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curious 4G experience

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curious 4G experience

Postby 9fingers » 02 May 2021, 13:56

There was I sat in the A&E car park waiting for Mrs to be seen to and playing with my iphone.

Nice elevated position not shielded and outside the car getting 4G with 4 out of 4 bars signal strength.
Could not connect to TWH2 nor WUK not even in desperation UKW.
Then a whatsapp message pinged through so I thought the interweb is back up but still no forums or banking or most other things I could try.
Really strangely (to me at least) Whatsapp, Farcebook and Messenger all working fine. Do they run over 2G perhaps? perhaps the hospital patients were hogging all the 4G bandwidth?
Coincidentally all Facebook products worked, surely those all use/need normal mobile data for photos in the same way as Safari would?

Anyone got a theory to support my observations. Now I'm back home I realised I should have tried Chrome browser but too late now.

Bob
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Re: curious 4G experience

Postby Woodbloke » 02 May 2021, 19:19

9fingers wrote:There was I sat in the A&E car park waiting for Mrs to be seen to and playing with my iphone.

Nice elevated position not shielded and outside the car getting 4G with 4 out of 4 bars signal strength.
Could not connect to TWH2 nor WUK not even in desperation UKW.
Then a whatsapp message pinged through so I thought the interweb is back up but still no forums or banking or most other things I could try.
Really strangely (to me at least) Whatsapp, Farcebook and Messenger all working fine. Do they run over 2G perhaps? perhaps the hospital patients were hogging all the 4G bandwidth?
Coincidentally all Facebook products worked, surely those all use/need normal mobile data for photos in the same way as Safari would?

Anyone got a theory to support my observations. Now I'm back home I realised I should have tried Chrome browser but too late now.

Bob


It may be unconnected Bob, but SWIMBO (who now works at Odstock) has told me that the t'interweb connection thingie on site is virtually non-existant and NHS staff have to go to various 'hot spots' to get a signal - Rob
I no longer work for Axminster Tools & Machinery.
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Re: curious 4G experience

Postby 9fingers » 02 May 2021, 19:53

Thanks Rob,
T'was indeed Odstock A&E that I was located. As you possibly know it is a very clear elevated location.

Bob
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https://drive.google.com/file/d/1dBTVXx ... sp=sharing
Email:motors@minchin.org.uk
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Re: curious 4G experience

Postby spb » 02 May 2021, 20:04

That sounds as though, while you've got a strong signal strength, there are too many devices in that area for one tower to cope with - quite common in hospitals, amongst other places. That'll generally manifest in full strength being shown, because the phone is only measuring your connection to the tower, but unreliable data connections as packets get delayed or dropped due to congestion.

Most apps will use TCP connections for two-way communications, which require multiple round-trips between your device and the server, so are likely to time out and drop if there's significant congestion or delays on the connection. Push notifications use UDP, which is one-way and can't time out that way. That could explain messages coming through when Safari couldn't connect outwards. It's also theoretically possible that the network is prioritising Facebook and friends on the basis that that's what most end users will be using.

Chrome won't behave any differently, incidentally - on iPhone/iPad, it's just a different interface wrapped around Safari, because Apple won't let anyone else run a JavaScript engine.
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Re: curious 4G experience

Postby 9fingers » 02 May 2021, 20:20

Thanks
That makes sense. I'm not too up to speed on the details of 4G. Although many years ago (1987) I was involved in the development of 2G (then called GSM) and sent the first pictures of Tower bridge opening and closing over one of the first 2G point to point links into a BT press conference. We had 19" racks of gear doing a mere fraction of what a pocket sized smart phone will do today!

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Email:motors@minchin.org.uk
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Re: curious 4G experience

Postby RogerS » 02 May 2021, 21:43

Ah...4G...I can but dream...
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Re: curious 4G experience

Postby AJB Temple » 03 May 2021, 13:53

spb wrote:Chrome won't behave any differently, incidentally - on iPhone/iPad, it's just a different interface wrapped around Safari, because Apple won't let anyone else run a JavaScript engine.


Stephen, would you mind explaining that a bit please for my edification? Are you saying that whatever web browser we think we are using, if it is an Apple device then in essence it runs Safari in the background?

I nearly always run Safari, but sometimes it is just hopeless with certain web sites. I find Safari does not really get on with Wipr as an ad blocker, so yesterday I tried Bravo to browse certain news sites (I read all the mainstream papers irrespective of political leaning, then average them out).

You can't customise Safari much these days.
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Re: curious 4G experience

Postby spb » 03 May 2021, 14:14

AJB Temple wrote:Stephen, would you mind explaining that a bit please for my edification? Are you saying that whatever web browser we think we are using, if it is an Apple device then in essence it runs Safari in the background?

Short answer: for iOS, yes. For Mac, no.

Longer answer: while they're based on the same core technology, when developing the iPhone (and later iPad) operating system, they didn't have the same constraints of backwards compatibility with existing applications because there weren't any. As a result, iOS apps are much more constrained than Mac applications in what they can do. Operations that any desktop software developer would take for granted are controlled by application entitlement settings, which are baked into the application signing setup and so ultimately controlled by Apple. There's a list of entitlements that any developer can enable if their application needs it, a smaller set (such as, recently, the Covid exposure tracking system) that specific organisations can use on application to Apple, and another set that are only allowed for Apple's own apps. The ability to generate and execute code at runtime, which is required for any modern JavaScript engine, is one of that latter list, and so anything that acts like a web browser on iOS is just using Safari.

For MacOS, introducing restrictions like that at any point would have broken so many existing applications which people rely on that they haven't been able to do it fully yet, though they're trying slowly. For now, though, Chrome or Firefox on MacOS will still be using their own rendering engines as they do on other platforms.
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Re: curious 4G experience

Postby AJB Temple » 03 May 2021, 14:34

Thank you.
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