Facebook Goes Super-slow on 2G Tuesday to Understand Slow Speeds

SP's: Facebook has launched 2G Tuesday initiative where it will simulate 2G Internet speeds for its employees to empathize with the users of developing countries. This move will help the engineers to optimise their products for such communities with super slow Internet speeds.

Know the devil before you work with him. Understanding the gist of the saying, Facebook, which is up against a task of building applications for a community of over a billion people with super slow Internet speed has announced a 2G Tuesday initiative to help its employees learn what it feels to be working in such conditions.

Targeting the emerging markets such as India, Facebook is creating an environment for its employees to empathize with the users and build products that would benefit the users of developing countries. After all, the Internet.org, Facebook’s pet project of connecting the world would fail miserably if there is no Internet or rather say no speed.

Facebook recently witnessed over a billion daily users, of which most of them were online with 2G connections, unlike USA and Europe where a web page sometimes takes over 2 minutes to load.

Now, knowing the problems of such users, the engineers at Facebook are working on optimizing the News Feed for slower networks.

Tomi Alison, Engineering director at Facebook reminisces his first experience with Business Insider as he said, “I felt like, Whoa! It definitely tested my patience — it felt like parts of the product were just broken.”

To better understand the situation, many top technicians often visit places like India and Kenya and regularly use the 2G simulated phones. This helps improve the quality of their product and cajoles the customers as well.

Facebook has also developed an open-source app for slow network testing that will let its app know the user’s connection speed and then display the new feed accordingly, like the preference of status updates over videos.

2G Tuesday can be a nightmare for the Facebook employees but the result will definitely be a boon for the users in developing countries.