Designing For/With People With Low Bandwidth

Designing fo Low Bandwidth Users

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- Low power, out of date Android phones used in Africa - Small lower power devices like Raspberry Pis - Distributed social networks like Scuttlebut - Mesh networks used in disaster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 - Browser development tools can simulate low bandwidth websites - netdm simulates network latency

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