Re: detecting connection speed

James, I understand it's a difficult problem to solve, however it will be a very useful dimension when conducting analysis on performance data.
May be we should start with what the possible solutions could be, and then consider the pros & cons?

Phillipe, how can we obtain more info on Network Information API status?

Cheers,
Puneet



From: James Graham <james@hoppipolla.co.uk<mailto:james@hoppipolla.co.uk>>
Date: Tuesday, December 3, 2013 9:46 PM
To: "public-web-perf@w3.org<mailto:public-web-perf@w3.org>" <public-web-perf@w3.org<mailto:public-web-perf@w3.org>>
Subject: Re: detecting connection speed
Resent-From: <public-web-perf@w3.org<mailto:public-web-perf@w3.org>>
Resent-Date: Tuesday, December 3, 2013 9:47 PM

On 03/12/13 16:04, Philippe Le Hegaret wrote:
On Wed, 2013-11-27 at 09:38 +0000, Puneet Mohan Sangal wrote:
Is there any ongoing work in detecting connection speed, as part of
this group?
See http://www.w3.org/TR/system-info-api/#network and http://www.w3.org/2012/11/performance-workshop/report.html#i4


The short answer is no one is working on it in the web performance
working group at the moment. I don't quickly see any visible progress on
the Network Information API for the past 12 months but you may want to
ask them if there were progress or not.

Detecting connection speed in a useful way is a very difficult problem,
not least because it's often a time varying quantity (consider a mobile
device that might switch between wifi, 3G, 3G but with high packet loss,
and no signal at all, all in the course of interacting with a single
page). I think that in general trying to expose this kind of data can
lead to worse user experiences than not exposing it (e.g. if pages
erroneously shift into some sort of "low bandwidth" mode due to some
temporary network congestion or whatever). Therefore I don't think this
should be something that we expose, unless it is clear that we can do it
in a good way that will solve actual problems.