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Recently Shane Lowry, our VP of Engineering, wrote a blog post on how the next
disruption in application delivery is about eliminating human middleware.
I wanted to provide some more context and also share some data nuggets to expand
on the facts laid out in that article.
Its no surprise that mobile adoption and the advent of cloud computing are the two
biggest disruptions we have seen in the Internet service delivery space. In this post,
we consider the implications for both client and server side given these disruptions.
We will also show that content sizes are increasing, device diversity is exploding and
the new choke point for application delivery is now the Radio Resource Controller
(RRC) and Radio Access Network (RAN). These challenges dictate a solution space
that's different from the previous approaches we have seen and Instart Logic is
specifically focused here.
First, lets start by talking about the two key disruptions mobile and its impact on the
client/device front; and cloud-based computing and what that means for the back end.
MOBILE
Globally, mobile traffic is about 30% of all Internet
activity today and is increasing rapidly, with an
additional 6% of activity generated from tablets.
The Cisco Visual Networking Index (VNI)
provides the following quantitative estimates in
mobile data growth, which shows that we expect
to see an 18x increase in 5 years (2011-2016).
15
10
0
2012
2013
2014
2015
2016
Device Model
GT-I9100
Android 4.4
Android 4.2
Android 4.1
iOs 7.1
iOs 8.0
Other Android
Other iOs
Miscellaneous
CLOUD SERVICE
ADOPTION
While the client side is exploding, on the
server side we see a trend towards cloud
adoption. The manifestation of cloud
computing for web pages is the presence
of a lot of third party components such as
widgets doing A/B testing, providing feedback via beacons, and tracking user behavior
apart from providing analytics. This increases
the number of components on a given web
page while not exactly contributing much
to the overall payload. We saw that roughly
48% of the requests in http archive are
classified as third-party.
2005
2007
2009
2011
2013
2015
8000
6000
4000
2000
7/1/2012 1/1/2013 7/1/2013 1/1/2014 7/1/2014
12000
12000
9000
9000
6000
6000
3000
3000
0
7/1/20121/1/20137/1/20131/1/20147/1/2014
7/1/20121/1/20137/1/20131/1/20147/1/2014
(Note: the collection of data changed a bit in the middle, when the
throughput of the mobile device measurement was altered to use an
emulated 3G network in June 2013. However these changes do not
affect our conclusion in any meaningful way.)
So why is the Mobile Web getting slower?
CONTENT IS
GETTING
FATTER
The first fairly obvious reason is the growth in richer and more
content-intensive web sites. To substantiate this claim, we took
a look at the Page weight metric.
600000
600000
600000
500000
500000
500000
400000
400000
400000
300000
300000
300000
200000
200000
200000
Median_byteVolume
Median_byteVolume
Median_byteVolume
As you can see, the uniform trend across all cohorts is a marked
increase in page bytes.
Next we wanted to see if we could pin this increase to particular
types of web traffic, so we separated out the Page weight data
by content types:
Top 1K Size by Content Type Evolution Over Time
22500
20000
17500
15000
12500
1200000
1000000
800000
600000
18000
14000
12000
10000
Median_HtmlBytes
Median_JsBytes
Median_CssBytes
250000
250000
200000
200000
150000
Median_ImgBytes
150000
Median_HtmlBytes
Median_JsBytes
Median_CssBytes
250000
Median_HtmlBytes
Median_JsBytes
Median_CssBytes
Median_ImgBytes
200000
150000
Median_ImgBytes
NETWORK LATENCY
OF THE ACCESS MEDIUM
Page load
Time (ms)
3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
Page load
Time (ms)
1 Mbps
2 Mbps
3 Mbps
4 Mbps
5 Mbps
6 Mbps
7 Mbps
8 Mbps
9 Mbps
10 Mbps
40 ms
20 ms
3500
3000
2500
2000
1500
1000
200 ms
180 ms
160 ms
140 ms
120 ms
100 ms
80 ms
60 ms
5000
South Asia
S.E. Asia
Russia
3750
Oceania
North America
Middle East
2500
Latin America
Europe
East Asia
1250
Central Asia
Balkans
Africa
0
1/1/2011
1/1/2012
7/1/2011
1/1/2013
7/1/2012
1/1/2014
7/1/2013
Date/time of measurement
7/1/2014
As you can see, in the last couple of years there has been a small improvement
in RTTs, but by and large nothing meaningful.
Since the majority of e-commerce and hosting providers happen to be in the US,
let's look for FCC reports on latencies across DSL, Cable and Fiber.
DSL
Cable
Fiber
Average Latency
( Milliseconds )
70
60
50
40
30
20
10
0
1 Mbps
3 Mbps
In 2014, fiber-to-the-home
services provided 24 ms roundtrip latency on average, while
cable-based services averaged
31 ms, and DSL-based services
averaged 48 ms. Compare this
to 2013, where fiber-to-the-home
services provided 18 ms roundtrip latency on average, while
cable-based services averaged
26 ms, and DSL-based services
averaged 43 ms.
Overall latency is not getting any better if anything, it's getting worse. The average RTT to Google
is pretty much the same as it was in 2010, despite all the innovations brought to us by this awesome
company. An alternate study by M-Lab stresses this point of degradation in latency due to interconnections
between providers.
So far all the above data is desktop alone, so let's focus on latency numbers from AT&T:
LTE
AT&T core
network
latency
40-50 ms
HSPA +
50-200 ms
HSPA
EDGE
GPRS
150-400 ms
600-750 ms
600-750 ms
To put those latencies in context, also consider the bandwidth available by technology:
Generation
Data rate
2G
100-400 Kbit/s
3G
0.5-5 Mbit/s
4G
1-50 Mbit/s
Since we are talking about mobile data, lets see the overall path
a packet has to traverse to get service over the internet:
Technology
2G / 3G / 4G
/ Wi-Fi
Sectors
# of Directions
Per Cell Site
Radio Access
Sectors
# of Directions
Per Cell Site
Wireline Internet
Backbone
Backhaul
Core Network
Carriers
# of Spectrums
In Use
As you can see, its the confluence of a lot of technologies that helps
bring information to your fingertips.
CONCLUSIONS
So weve talked about a lot of different elements in this article. To summarize, we saw that web content is getting
richer while device diversity is exploding, and that we cannot pin our hopes on faster lanes, given that network
access times have been stagnant for over a decade (and will likely continue to be so in the near future). All these
forces combine together to create a new pressure point on RAN congestion, which is already at capacity.
While I have mostly dwelt on the problems in this post, the solution space for mobile web applications is to
Sounds easy enough, yet it requires a very different approach to application delivery one that we at Instart
Logic, with our Software-Defined Application Delivery platform, are focused on.
REFERENCES
HTTP Archive
Cisco VNI
Ilya Grigorik's blog
Android Fragmentation
Why Mobile Apps are Slow
More Bandwidth Doesn't Matter Much
M-Lab Interconnection Study
FCC Broadband America
Netflix ISP Speed Index
PingER Project
High Performance Browser Networking
Bessemer Cloud