The discussion actually misses two critical aspects - network topology and device usage in 3rd world countries.
Where is the speed issue coming into play? There are 3 areas of concern
1) App server and backbone speed
- This what the discussion is centering on. CDN is good.
2) Connection speed between client and ISP
- This is a critical issue when dealing with performance in
3rd world countries. CDN will NOT help here!
- As an example, there is likely a 200-300ms roundtrip from
your servers to the CDN and customer ISP. By using a CDN,
you remove this 200-300ms. If the customer is using GRPS
with 5000ms latency, your CDN has done almost nothing!
3) Customer's processing speed
- If your customer is using an old blackberry phone, and your
page is using complicated javascript, it could take 30+
seconds for the page to render for the user, even if the
content were local.
A way to get a grasp of the situation is not to filter your page load speed by country, but to drill down further and also use the user agent. Filter by country + user agent should let you know if the slowdown is caused by old Nokia phones, or if it's across Firefox and Chrome also.
In many cases, the solution is often to have a mobile WAP-alike site that has no fancy resources and just text and html fields. You can use javascript to detect if the page is loading slowly (15+ secs), and pop up a link to the special wap site.
Where is the speed issue coming into play? There are 3 areas of concern
A way to get a grasp of the situation is not to filter your page load speed by country, but to drill down further and also use the user agent. Filter by country + user agent should let you know if the slowdown is caused by old Nokia phones, or if it's across Firefox and Chrome also.In many cases, the solution is often to have a mobile WAP-alike site that has no fancy resources and just text and html fields. You can use javascript to detect if the page is loading slowly (15+ secs), and pop up a link to the special wap site.