broadband - Tag Archive

Bridging the digital divide

1 Reply George Guest

In this day and age, people have come to expect at least a modest speed for their internet connection. In many urban parts of the UK, speeds of around 10MB per second are commonplace, with some homes experiencing five times that amount. Home internet access has become a prerequisite for many school pupils in their learning, but not all of them are so lucky.

For many children based in rural areas or internet blackspots or for those whose families cannot afford to pay a premium for access, getting the information they need in order to complete their homework or simply boost their knowledge is extremely challenging. This is something that was raised by Estyn, the Welsh education watchdog, and they’re not alone.

Call for more investment

Those in rural areas, even if they’re just on the edge of major conurbations such as Greater Manchester and Leeds/Bradford, will find getting even basic broadband a pain, which has seen people in high-powered positions call for investment in improving connectivity where there is none. David Nuttall, the MP for Bury North in Greater Manchester, is one such voice.

Of the £990,000 allocated to the region, Mr Nuttall is calling for a large chunk of that to go towards people in his constituency who are experiencing problems with their speeds and, in extreme cases, access.

“Those who live in areas which have very slow broadband access speeds are seriously disadvantaged in this digital age”, he said in an interview with the Bury Times.

“Although in recent months we have seen some progress — for example in Nangreaves thanks to the hard work of local residents — there is still much to be done”, he added.

Solution from above

An optical fibre broadband cable

Whilst fibre optic broadband the fastest form of broadband, satellite broadband offers much faster speeds for those in rural communities, without optical fibre cables.

Until something is done about access to fast broadband nationwide, those affected are left to ponder what, if any, alternatives are open to them. One could come in the form of satellite broadband, which can work as more than just a stopgap solution.

“Many people don’t realise the role satellite broadband has in filling in rural not-spots and connecting the last 5% of homes and businesses that will never get fast broadband over wires”, said Andrew Walwyn, CEO of EuropaSat.

“The latest generation Ka band satellite broadband services offer defined, predictable service levels at reasonable cost, with no geographical discrimination. Using a small set-top box and an outside mini dish it’s now possible to deliver up to 20 Mb fast broadband to any property in the UK or indeed Europe.”

Is a lazy website key to online success?

8 Replies Christopher Roberts

Speed matters. Once upon a time, if a business had a website, it was revolutionary. Now in many cases if a business doesn’t have a website, it will usually suffer as a result.

When the internet was in its infancy, speed wasn’t really on the agenda. If your site loaded super fast (remember we are still in the days of 56kbps/dial-up internet access here) great. If it didn’t, people would be prepared to wait.

Nowadays there are so many different websites offering such similar information, if your site is slow, your traffic (or as I prefer to call it visitor numbers, or even better: people) will suffer as a result. There are countless studies into this, almost all of which conclude that the slower a site is, the fewer visitors it has.

Furthermore, speed is starting to become an evermore important search engine ranking factor – if your site is slow, you are less likely to rank at the top.

Okay, you get the point: today speed matters.

The problem with many websites is that they have so much to load. When you load our homepage, it isn’t just a few lines of HTML that your browser requests from our server, it also fetches a handful of local CSS, JavaScript and PHP files, in addition to bunch of images and some large chunks of external code, which are used to generate social media buttons.

This all takes time, and every extra byte and file that is requested will slow down the page load time.

Slim Down

One way to reduce the size of the page is to reduce the amount of files – and the size of those files – that are fetched. We make every effort to ensure that our locally loaded scripts are as condensed as possible, so your browser doesn’t have to request dozens of files, just one or two.

We have also combined several images into one file (a CSS sprite), again, so your browser has to fetch fewer files. Take a look at the image below for an example.

CSS sprite social media

Technology Bloggers social icons CSS sprite.

The trouble is, we only have control over internal files. I can’t go and reduce the Tweet button script and add it to one of our existing files, as it is controlled by Twitter, and served via their servers.

Lazy Loading Images

Sometimes slimming down isn’t enough, so one way to prevent the initial load becoming verbose is to delay the loading of images not in view. We use a WordPress plugin called Lazy Load, which only loads images just before they come into view. So if the page has five megabytes of images to load, and four are below the fold, then when the page loads, you will only have to wait for one megabytes worth of images to load; if you don’t scroll down, the other four never get loaded.

Lazy loading images can significantly help improve page load time, as images are usually the biggest files that a website loads, so only loading the vital ones really speeds things up!

Lazy Loading Social Buttons

As I mentioned above, one of the biggest strains on loading is external code, specifically social buttons and sharing buttons.

For a long time now, the ability to offer you the potential to share content and follow us via social media has come at a high price – in terms of loading time. However after a lot of coding and hours of tweaking, our social buttons are now just a tiny (in size) image.

If you take a look at our sidebar, the social buttons sill look very similar to before – Facebook like, Twitter follow and Google Plus recommend all still there – however they now only load the external scripts if you mouse over them. This removes a huge delay when you first load a page, and means we can provide these buttons on every page of the site, with a much smaller speed loss.

At the top of articles, the social buttons there now also load lazily, and only fetch code from the networks when you mouse over the button images.

Lazy loading sharing buttons.

Technology Bloggers delayed loading social buttons.

Lazy loading social media buttons has dramatically improved the speed of Technology Bloggers, and still enables you to share content when and how you choose.

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What is your view on delayed loading?

Rolling out Fibre Optic Broadband

6 Replies Jonny Hankins

This week the China Daily newspaper is carrying a story that has been picked up by many international news agencies. The paper states that the Ministry of Industry and Information Technology is ordering all newly built residences to install fiber optic connections in any city or county “where a public fiber optic telecom network is available.”

An ambitious project, particularly when put alongside the government’s hopes that 40 million families will be connected by fibre optic technology by 2015. These kinds of goals and regulations may seem impossible to those of us that live in the old world, but I would not be too sceptical about their interests and possibilities in China.

Here in the US we are a long long way from even getting broadband to large swathes of the country. The National Broadband map is a great source of information about how well connected we are, the maps are interactive and offer loads of information. Broadband coverage in general gets thinner on the ground as you move West, with much of the rural West and mid West still showing very little access. If you look at the map of fibre optic to home availability though you will see that we are talking about a very small number of providers and although it represents 17% of services it is extremely localized, with the vast majority of the country having no service.

Are you connected?

Internet cables

3.7% of the population have no high speed service at all, and although this seems like a small percentage, in a country the size of the USA it represents (by my calculation) about 13 million people.

Some analysts here are asking if the China intervention might be another Sputnik moment. The launch of the Sputnik pushed the US into the space race, fuelling investment and technological breakthrough. The question is whether the same will happen here.

If you are interested in how the world is connected, this article in the Global Finance magazine offers a table that shows the percentages of internet users divided into different countries. Some show a recent explosion is use, Albania going from 1% to 50% in 10 years, some are at above 90%, and some show little growth and remain in the 20’s or 30’s.

Given the importance for business the upgrading of existing infrastructure is of political interest. Both the US and UK governments have made broadband speed and distribution improvement a named priority. The UK government is putting in 530 million Pounds to roll out high speed internet to rural areas and in the US government has a similar plan, once more fueled by recent bad press about the quality of services offered across the country.

The Indian government is also pushing broadband extension. In a recent report increase in GDP is directly linked to broadband access, with failures on the parts of telecom companies blamed for losses in earnings and growth. India is expected to be the largest internet base on the planet by 2015, moving to above 300 million users and overtaking the US. With an extremely technology savvy society and better and wider infrastructure this must represent a great opportunity to the country.

So politics plays an important role in creating infrastructure. In an article last year on the innovation Excellence blog I wrote about how the FIFA World Cup had lead to the introduction of fibre optic technology to Africa (with a few hiccups) so large international events also play a part in creating infrastructure and generating opportunities.

So how good are the providers where you are?