I'm moving house at the moment, and have been looking at using mobile broadband in place of a regular internet connection — after all it can be quite a hassle to get set up with a land-line and an ISP. There is a lot of activity in the mobile broadband market at the moment, and the products look like a worthy alternative, some even claiming near-ADSL download speeds of 7 megabits per second for a reasonable monthly charge.
I thought it prudent to arrange some demonstrations with a few of the mobile broadband providers, and to borrow some data cards from my friends to see what it's like living with the service. What I found came as quite a surprise!
None of the glossy marketing makes mention of the
content filtering and
image compression that the UK's providers of mobile broadband employ (a service known as Bytemobile). I work in the web industry, and the quality of images and the ability to rely on my clients seeing a website as it should be, is very important to me.
Having tried out most of the sites that I usually visit, and those of my clients, I was shocked to find that images were often
compressed to the point of it being impossible to distinguish what is in the picture, and that script is automatically inserted to the HTML source code of the pages - in several cases this
script actually broke the functionality within the page.
The providers say that they do this to keep your costs down, that by providing a heavily compressed image in place of the original will use less of your bandwidth. This is hugely disappointing, as it gives a genuinely awful web browsing experience, though one may re-load the page within 5 seconds to request the original quality images.
This service also injects JavaScript into the pages. This script works to allow low-quality images to be individually refreshed. It works by adding tooltips to images which prompt you to update the picture by hovering over with the mouse and pressing a key. The problem is that this script rides roughshod over the existing website code, meaning that in many cases things stop working!
This is absolutely terrible for web developers, designers and digital agencies because it means that our sites can look awful, will have been changed at HTML source level automatically, thereby damaging functionality in the process. It’s also fairly cheeky of the mobile operator as this wodge of JavaScript counts towards your bandwidth allocation and is served inline with every page, increasing the per-page size. Refreshing the entire page (which is easier than the per-image method) means that you end up loading many pages twice, using yet more of your bandwidth!
It is not clear how to disable this content filtering: Staff in the high-street shops were generally unaware that this was a problem, and technical support lines offered little help. The forums of the operators have many posts from disgruntled users asking how to disable the service or return their data card.
Its time for this service to become more transparent, to be disabled by default and offered to the users of mobile broadband as a choice which clearly demonstrates the drawbacks as well as the benefits of content compression.
Dominic Winsor, User-experience consultant, Design Haus, 2008-09-17