Designing For/With People With Low Bandwidth

Example use cases we're interested or things folks are working on

Low power, out of date Android phones used in Africa
Small lower power devices like Raspberry Pis
Distributed social networks like Scuttlebut
Mesh networks used in disaster recovery
Improving widely used website platforms
Improve online tools that were not built with low bandwidth users in mind
USSD mobile protocol for simple menus options over a dial pad (used mainly outside the US)
- Used widely for mobile money/payments
- Cost is high - 10-20k for each phone company
Compared to IVR voice menu system used over the phone

Types of solutions

Mobile - USSD, mobile money/payments
Bit size and graphics for web sites
Browser based - Progressive Web Apps
Offline servers
- Large content like Wikipedia, Khan Academy, Open Street Maps, etc
- Tiny server equivalents like Kiwix and the Offline Archive
- Internet in a box, Rachel, Freedom Box, Bibliotecs that take these applications and bundle them together into local, offline servers
Local partners like mesh networks, local messaging services, Fediverse, Activity Pub standard

Most of the peer-to-peer technologies don't work in this space because they have a high protocol overhead that takes too much bandwidth

Development tools

Barriers

Example of Facebook partnering with mobile providers to have data used to access Facebook be for free, but paid for all other web services

Sidebar: how mobile payments work

Started as exchanging credit for minutes on a phone plan
Evolved into sending money
SIM card acts as a wallet
Go to a kiosk and purchase credit that goes on your SIM card that can be sent to other users in that phone network
Being limited to sending and receiving money in a particular network is problematic

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