Facebook speeds up Web in Indonesia

Facebook’s project to bring the Internet to rural and developing areas around the globe worked with wireless companies in Indonesia to speed up local mobile applications by up to 70 percent.

Over the last year, Facebook’s Internet.org project has been working with two companies — Ericsson and XL Axiata — to analyze and speed up people’s access to the Web via their smartphones, without building major new infrastructure.

{mosads}“The network-wide adjustments delivered up to 70 percent improvement in network performance from the user perspective,” Internet.org said. 

“Thanks to this research, we now have a replicable model for analyzing, measuring and improving network performance that can be applied to any mobile network,” it added. “This will help operators cost-effectively target network improvements to the areas that affect users most, which means greater utility for the two-thirds of the world not yet connected.”

In places like Indonesia, many areas have cellular service, but people rarely use apps to access the Internet, due in part to the high cost of paying for data.

Internet.org — the project launched by Facebook and other companies to connect the rest of the world to the Internet — released a white paper analyzing ways companies can make existing networks more efficient for mobile applications, based on its experiment in Indonesia. 

“This model can now be applied to any mobile network to help operators cost-effectively target network improvements in the areas that will have the most impact on user satisfaction, loyalty and retention,” it said.