In February, Congress opened the door to an increase in network capacity for mobile devices, proposing legislation that permits the auction of public airwaves now used for television broadcasts to wireless Internet suppliers. The government too recognizes the importance of speed in mobile computing.
Later this month, Akamai plans to introduce mobile accelerator software to help speed up the loading of a Web site or app. The hunger for speed on smartphones is a new business opportunity for companies like Akamai Technologies, which specializes in helping Web sites deliver services quicker. The major search engines, Google and Microsoft’s Bing, are the speed demons of the Web, analysts say, typically delivering results in less than a second. Download times on personal computers average about six seconds worldwide, and about 3.5 seconds on average in the United States. On a mobile phone, a Web page takes a leisurely nine seconds to load, according to Google, which tracks a huge range of sites from the homes of large companies to the legions of one-person bloggers.
Four out of five online users will click away if a video stalls while loading. As entertainment and news sites, like The New York Times Web site, offer more video clips and interactive graphics, that can slow things down.īut speed matters in every context, research shows. And Web sites constantly face trade-offs between visual richness and snappy response times. A person will be more patient waiting for a video clip to load than for a search result. The performance of Web sites varies, and so do user expectations. “Two hundred fifty milliseconds, either slower or faster, is close to the magic number now for competitive advantage on the Web,” said Harry Shum, a computer scientist and speed specialist at Microsoft. People will visit a Web site less often if it is slower than a close competitor by more than 250 milliseconds (a millisecond is a thousandth of a second). The competition to be the quickest is fierce. The reason is that data-hungry smartphones and tablets are creating frustrating digital traffic jams, as people download maps, video clips of sports highlights, news updates or recommendations for nearby restaurants. Google and other tech companies are on a new quest for speed, challenging the likes of Mr.
“Subconsciously, you don’t like to wait,” said Arvind Jain, a Google engineer who is the company’s resident speed maestro. That barely perceptible delay causes people to search less. Remember when you were willing to wait a few seconds for a computer to respond to a click on a Web site or a tap on a keyboard? These days, even 400 milliseconds - literally the blink of an eye - is too long, as Google engineers have discovered.
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