Today I’m happy to announce the first two Mobitest locations outside our main lab in Ottawa, Canada: an iPhone 4 in Amsterdam, hosted by Aaron Peters, and a Nexus S in Dulles, hosted by Patrick Meenan. Thanks to Aaron and Patrick for helping expanding Mobitest to more parts of the globe! You can try out these new locations simply by browsing to http://mobitest.akamai.com/ and selecting the relevant location.
We hope these two locations are but the first of many. Mobile Web Performance is very location sensitive, and more locations means better visibility into performance, and eventually faster websites. If you’re interested in hosting a test location, please let us know at contact@blaze.io. The locations are currently all WiFi based, but we hope to add 3G networks to the list as well.
Why Location Matters?
Different locations mean different networks, different distances from the web server, and quite often different website content. While locations matter for both desktop and mobile browsers, it’s often seen as an even bigger component of the mobile web. With these locations, we’ll be closer to finding out.
Let’s look at a few examples of sites that return different content to different geographies. If you browse to www.google.com, you’ll get redirected to www.google.ca from our Ottawa location and to www.google.nl from Aaron Peters’ lab in Amsterdam. You’ll get the original www.google.com from Patrick Meenan’s Data Center in Dulles.
Browsing www.cnn.com from Ottawa leads to m.cnn.com, loads in about 3 seconds, and requires 23 requests and 124KB. Browsing from Amsterdam leads to cnnmobile.com, which takes almost 7 seconds to load, despite having only 15 requests and 58KB in size.
Whether your own website is location aware or you’re learning about your competition, measuring from multiple locations can be very insightful.
Wanted: More Locations
We’re very interested in adding more test locations to Mobitest, both to expand the visibility to global performance and to increase capacity in these different locations. Got an old Android phone lying around? Upgraded to iPhone 4 and not sure what to do with your 3GS? Interested in helping promote mobile web performance? If so, please let us know at contact@blaze.io.