An asynchronous Internet in GNOME [LWN.net]

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 8, 2016 7:37 UTC (Thu) by eru (subscriber, #2753)
Parent article: An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Lack of ubiquitous network is not just a developing world problem! Anyone who travels with a device encounters it even in the "first world". Data roaming is still expensive, even within Europe. Free wifi hotspots usually needs some sort of registration to use (with email confirmations at worst), quite frustrating when you know you may need it only for a few minutes in a given location.

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 8, 2016 8:21 UTC (Thu) by NRArnot (subscriber, #3033) [Link] (4 responses)

Also, domestic access to Broadband internet is by no means universal. Here in the UK if you live in a rural community the only options may be a modem or satellite broadband. The latter is too expensive for many. The former gets you 56 kbit/s. Software really ought to be tested for usability if the internet connection is **slow** as well as if it's non-existent.

There's also the issue of what happens if your phone line dies on a Saturday, with a Monday deadline looming. There's little chance that the phone company will fix it over a weekend. Is it really a good idea for one's software to depend on internet connectivity?

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 9, 2016 9:22 UTC (Fri) by roblucid (guest, #48964) [Link] (1 responses)

Yes, staying in a location even with broadband at 1Mb/s, Windows 10 has poor characteristics. The PC may become effectively unusable due to simultaneous system downloads choking other applications.

This greed for bandwidth can only grow and leave a larger & larger slice of the market poorly served by mainstream always online model.

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 9, 2016 15:36 UTC (Fri) by zlynx (guest, #2285) [Link]

I used to use 144 Kbps IDSL and later 1.5 Mbps T1. Everything worked fine.

More bandwidth covers up problems but it really is not the answer you want. What you want is traffic shaping and bandwidth management, and buffer-bloat control. I used to use a heavily hacked WonderShaper script and RED with ECN on a Linux router box.

Try it and you'll be surprised at how useful 1 Mbps is. It's really plenty of bandwidth for most Internet uses. Even applications like Netflix worked fine at 1.5 Mbps. Simultaneously with VOIP, even.

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 15, 2016 20:20 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> Here in the UK if you live in a rural community the only options may be a modem or satellite broadband.

Even if you don't live in a rural community ...

Broadband over copper is "up to 20 Mb". I get 17Mb. And yet I'm plagued by unusable internet, which I think is other people saturating the network - whether its people at home on my lan, or people elsewhere saturating the exchange, I don't know.

Cheers,
Wol

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 16, 2016 7:26 UTC (Fri) by paulj (subscriber, #341) [Link]

I have "unreliable" DSL in the UK too. When I say unreliable, I mean long-lived TCP connections often get "wedged" - no more packets pass, even while packets for new connections work. Stateful middle-boxes in the ISP, no doubt.

Yay for the consequences of "Won't someone think of the children?!!" pressure policies by the UK government which have effectively forced most ISPs to implement filters - without any legislation requiring it.

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 8, 2016 13:10 UTC (Thu) by nedrichards (guest, #23295) [Link]

As someone who works at Endless on just this sort of problem I totally agree with you. Internally we talk about 'bad internet' as being a key target and bad internet is everywhere. For ecosystem related reasons our primary product target is selling PCs to people who don't have them yet (very few of which live in EU/US) but that doesn't mean that a project like GNOME has to think that way, these principles should be valid everywhere and helpful for everyone.

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 8, 2016 16:25 UTC (Thu) by josh (subscriber, #17465) [Link] (5 responses)

> Free wifi hotspots usually needs some sort of registration to use (with email confirmations at worst), quite frustrating when you know you may need it only for a few minutes in a given location.

I ran into a hotspot once that wanted email confirmation before allowing use. How, exactly, did they think you'd check that email and handle the confirmation?

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 8, 2016 17:48 UTC (Thu) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link] (2 responses)

In the case I encountered it, the issue was that mobile networks in the area only had GPRS (no EDGE, UMTS, no LTE - just good old 2.5G data). The thought was that you'd use your 2.5G data at ~10 kbit/s to confirm, then they'd have some e-mails for marketing purposes in return for running ADSL2+ to their premises and sticking a cheap AP on the end.

The business model behind it has gone now that there's LTE in the area from at least one network, but the registration system remains...

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 28, 2016 15:09 UTC (Wed) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link] (1 responses)

2.5G is EDGE and provides maybe 40-50 Kbit/s. GPRS is 2G and provides maybe 10 Kbit/s. At least that's why my Nokia used to show in the statusbar (2G for GPRS, 2.5G for EDGE, 3G for UMTS, 3.5G for HSDPA).

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 28, 2016 15:19 UTC (Wed) by farnz (subscriber, #17727) [Link]

Definitions vary - I'm using the ones from Wikipedia, where 2G is circuit switched data only (as per the launch version of GSM), GPRS is 2.5G (using 2.5G for the first version of the network that did PSD), EDGE is 2.75G.

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 15, 2016 20:09 UTC (Thu) by Wol (subscriber, #4433) [Link] (1 responses)

> I ran into a hotspot once that wanted email confirmation before allowing use. How, exactly, did they think you'd check that email and handle the confirmation?

Most hotspots I use seem to think that the only thing people use the internet for is browsing. I spent ages trying to debug why Thunderbird wasn't working, only to realise I needed to click through the licence agreement - which meant I had to fire up Firefox.

Not a problem, just a right royal pain if you don't realise what's going on!

Cheers,
Wol

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 28, 2016 15:12 UTC (Wed) by mgedmin (guest, #34497) [Link]

> Not a problem, just a right royal pain if you don't realise what's going on!

This is why captive portal detection was invented. My Android pops up a notification when it detects a captive portal, and when I tap on it, it opens the portal's web page in a new app window (so it doesn't clutter my Chrome tabs, yay), and even closes it automatically when the captive portal doesn't require you to log in. (Don't ask me why there are captive portals that collect no information and require no confirmation for terms and conditions, just redirect your first web visit to some web page. They exist.)

I believe Network Manager can do this too, but I don't know if it's enabled by default on most distros. At least I haven't seen it work :/

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 8, 2016 19:15 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (2 responses)

I haven't checked the tariffs recently, but IIRC roaming costs for my phone are something like £50p/MB. Even though the network provider still bills like it's the 1980s, in reality the world uses 3G/4G/LTE, so that works out to about 10 seconds worth of credit if I'm not careful.

Sometimes I tether my phone to my laptop while travelling in spite of this, but only because I've gone to great pains to ensure the software on it isn't the sort that consumes all available resources it finds.

There's a much more widespread problem here and this is just a symptom of it: far too many developers these days are spoiled rotten and blinded by their own confirmation bias. The way they build software is like having cars with no suspension, because all they know is perfectly smooth suburban roads. Everyone else is in for a rough ride if they have to pay for their internet traffic, or thought your flavour-of-the-month plain text instant messaging app would be usable with only a gigabyte of RAM, or plug one too many monitors in…

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 8, 2016 22:02 UTC (Thu) by flussence (guest, #85566) [Link] (1 responses)

Er, that number ought to read £0.50. The ISP's only behind the times, not medieval :-)

An asynchronous Internet in GNOME

Posted Sep 11, 2016 2:22 UTC (Sun) by ianmcc (guest, #88379) [Link]

That is presumably EU roaming? The original number wasn't far off for international roaming - Vodafone in Australia charge about AU$50 / MB for international roaming, IIRC $2.50 for a txt message.