A Worldwide Look Into Mobile Access Networks Through the Eyes of AmiGos

Mobile phones are nowadays the predominant way for users to access the Internet. Despite modern phones are often more powerful than fixed devices, the majority of users worldwide still rely on simple devices, with limited hardware capabilities (small CPUs and memory, 2.4Ghz WiFi). In this paper, we investigate the user experience of low-end mobile devices world-wide. The goal is to answer high level questions like "which performance can you expect at a 10$ cost around the world?", as well as low level questions like "what is the culprit of a slowdown? the low-end device or network provisioning?". This is a challenging study we tackled by building the AmiGo test-bed, which relies on friends (hence the name) to carry - not use - mobile phones while traveling, guaranteeing network connectivity, i.e., WiFi and/or mobile data when possible. We deployed this test-bed through 31 low-end devices which traveled across 24 countries over a month. Our analysis shows that the performance of mobile networks varies significantly across the globe, where only a hands-full of networks manage to achieve excellent network performance across a stack of experiments. Specifically: a) 50% of the mobile networks show a 40-70% chance of encountering a low data rate, b) only 20% of mobile networks are characterized by low latencies (<20ms to popular domains), c) networks across Asia, central/south America, and Africa have much higher CDN download times compared to Europe, exceeding a 10x increase in the case of Africa, d) most news websites load slowly, whereas YouTube achieves satisfactory performance, overall.