Lopez Family blog

A few months ago we changed our internet provider from cable to fiber optic. This change was mainly due to our unhappiness with the cable provider. The service from the cable company was fine for the most part, even if the connection speed topped out at 5Mbps for download. What made us want to change provider was the ever increasing costs of the service, every month there was an increase of about $1.00 hidden in mysterious fees.

Around that same time Fiber Optic service was new in our area and was offering pretty good deals. We ended up changing to a bundle deal which not only saved us money but we also now have a top download speed of around 20Mbps.

We had to wait a few days for installation but when the day came the FiOS technician installed everything in a matter of a couple of hours. Excitedly I tested my work laptop, which has Windows XP, both wired and wireless and got 20 – 21 Mbps download speeds. I used Speedtest to measure the download speeds, but there are other sites that will do the same. I also tested our Power Mac G4 (yes, I know it’s a dinosaur) which was wired directly to the wireless router that was provided, an Actiontec MI424WR. The speeds for the Power Mac were also close to 20Mbps so all was well, we had fast internet.

Only it wasn’t, Lisa’s Mac Mini had a painfully slow internet connection and the TiVo was also suffering from some of the same. At first I thought that it could be due to the fact that they were both in the room furthest from the router. But the room isn’t quite that far and I could get 20Mbps on my work laptop’s wireless.

I thought of many ideas on how to improve speeds in the living room so that the whole family could take advantage of the full 20Mbps. I considered running wires to the living room, which wouldn’t have been easy because we have a crawl space under the living room to which I’ve no idea how to get to. I also considered buying some of those power line Ethernet adapters, but the idea of using our electrical wiring wasn’t too appealing since it’s pretty old and I wasn’t sure how it would hold up or if we’d get better connection speeds.

Then I remembered my old Linksys WRT54G which was just in a bag somewhere in the basement. I couldn’t connect it directly to the entry point since the service comes into the house via coax cable so I had to still us the Actiontec router as the entry point. I plugged the Linksys to the Actiontec router and turned of the Actiontec’s wireless. I changed all our computers and the TiVo to use the Linksys wireless.
I tested with my laptop to make sure I was getting the same speed as before and then I tested with Lisa’s Mac. Surprisingly that change made the whole difference, Lisa’s computer was now getting 20+Mbps and the TiVo is able to stream content from the internet without any choppiness.

Just out of curiosity I had both routers with the wireless turned on and sitting next to each other. I tested using the Actiontec’s wireless from Lisa’s computer, and got the expected 5Mbps download. I then connected the Mini to the Linksys router and got 21Mpbs.

So the moral of the story, if you have FiOS, get rid of the Actiontec router and use one that will allow you to take advantage of the full potential of your connection. If you want to try it yourself I found these two guides helpful Using a Linksys Router with Verizon FiOS and Making an Actiontec MI424-WR a Network Bridge.

I recently had to do some research for an article on mobile web performance, so I looked up stats on mobile phones and mobile web applications. There were several angles to it, the website, the phone that was being used to reach the website and the carrier the phone used to access the Internet.

Among the things I found in my research was the fact that Nokia phones are the most popular mobile phones in the world, something like 40% of the world’s mobile phones are Nokia, just for some reference, iPhones make up 13% of the world’s mobile phones (Click here to see the report). Surprisingly when looking at phones that are used to access the internet it’s very close between Nokia and iPhone. Stat Counter is a great place for that sort of information.

Ok so you’re probably thinking that it’s not big news that the iPhone is close to being the most popular phone for accessing the web. But what I did find interesting was the fact that some web applications are aimed at particular browsers/devices. So if the visitor is using an iPhone they get one version of the application, if they use a Nokia they’ll get a different version, if you’re using your home computer yet another, etc., etc.

This sounds like a good thing, but, consider the fact that the iPhone runs a full browser but uses phone carriers to get it’s data. This means that a full application is being passed on to the phone via what is the equivalent of a DSL connection. The image of camel through eye of needle comes to mind.

I can’t go into detail of the findings since the article hasn’t been published yet but the last bit that I’ll share is that out of the four carriers that I used in my study, Sprint was the fastest and T-Mobile was the slowest. The other two were Verizon and AT&T.

As I took the time to get the blog back up and running I remembered how slow it was. Considering I make my living by telling people that performance matters and consult with them on how to improve their site’s performance I thought this a bit embarrassing.

Of course I’d known for a long time that this blog was slow and heavy but never had dedicated the time to improving it because I was too busy helping others improve theirs.

This past week I made some changes to make the site faster. The first thing I did was to move the videos off to Vimeo instead of hosting them on our site. I did the same thing with our pictures, all our new albums are on Picasa. By moving all this heavy content off the blog, the size of the pages was reduced and thus the response time dropped. The last change was actually the one that made the biggest difference. I installed a WordPress plug-in called “WP Super Cache” which makes static files from the dynamically created WordPress pages. My colleague Stephen Pierzchala actually measured the performance difference when he switched to using WP Super Cache.

The result is an average response time of about 2 seconds for the US and about 5 to 6 seconds in Europe and sadly 12 seconds in China. Not too concerned about that last one since I’m pretty sure we have no readers in China or anywhere in Asia for that matter.

My favorite part of all this is that our blog is now also available on your mobile phone.