Sidebar Sidebar
Become a MacRumors Supporter for $50/year with no ads, ability to filter front page stories, and private forums.

Does your carrier apply the "90s internet filter"?

B

borisiii

macrumors 6502
Original poster
Jul 4, 2010
358
0
I noticed that when using 3G, images in mobile safari load at lower quality, presumably to reduce data consumed and speed up surfing on 3G. It gives web pages a sort of 90s look. I noticed the effect when I was viewing a website with an image of a map, but the rendering over 3G was too low quality for me to be able to read it.

Does your carrier do it - and do you think it's a good thing?

Attached images: An image from MR rendered over wifi, 3G on o2, and 3G on T-mobile. It seems that T-mobile reduces quality the most.
 

Attachments

  • wifi.PNG
    wifi.PNG
    308.3 KB · Views: 230
  • O2.PNG
    O2.PNG
    303.6 KB · Views: 176
  • tmobile.PNG
    tmobile.PNG
    291.3 KB · Views: 185
The iPhone restricts downloads over 3g to 20MB. You will need to jailbreak to circumvent the t=issue.
 
eagandale4114 said:
The iPhone restricts downloads over 3g to 20MB. You will need to jailbreak to circumvent the t=issue.
Click to expand...

It was more of an observation than a complaint. In almost four years of iPhone ownership this is the first time it has become apparent, and it wasn't an issue - five minutes later I had a wifi connection and I could read the map. Since the image would only have been a few kb, I doubt removing the 3G limit by JBing would have made a difference.

I was just wondering if other carriers like AT&T do it, and whether or not people think it's a good thing.
 
eagandale4114 said:
The iPhone restricts downloads over 3g to 20MB. You will need to jailbreak to circumvent the t=issue.
Click to expand...
Not the same thing and also not true. 3rd party apps can do downloads larger than 20MB.

Regarding the OP's question, I don't believe Verizon does it here in the states. At least it sure doesn't look like it. Sadly, stuff like this might become more widespread as data caps are now across the board for new accounts. Thankfully, I have unlimited so I can see the images in the full detail. :p Still, I can see it being both good and bad. I just don't know what side I'm on. Maybe give the consumer the option?
 
Are you seriously suggesting that this half-megapixel .jpg is larger than 20 MB? Come on.

OP, to answer your question, no, I have not experienced any such thing on AT&T.
 
No my SP does not apply a 90 second filter to my internet… or whatever that means. :confused:
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

Interesting. I would have imagined it would be an 'innovation' from the US since I get the impression that American carriers are kind of miserly when it comes to data.

By the way here is the exact link to the image I was using if you want to compare the rendering on your network.
http://images.macrumors.com/article-new/2011/09/ios5.jpg
 
Whoa, that's interesting. I thought Wifi and 3G were the same in terms of final quality. I don't think AT&T degrades the quality of pictures.


borisiii said:
Interesting. I would have imagined it would be an 'innovation' from the US since I get the impression that American carriers are kind of miserly when it comes to data.
Click to expand...


You got it backwards. American carriers would be more than happy to give you the higher quality data so you run out of your data in your bucket faster (so they can charge you overages)
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

alphaod said:
No my SP does not apply a 90 second filter to my internet… or whatever that means. :confused:
Click to expand...

lol 90s = 1990s, not 90 seconds.

The reason I was calling it a 90s look is because in the early days of the internet, images on pages were often heavily compressed to reduce page load times on dial-up modems, and the effect was similar to what O2 and T-Mobile are doing years later.
 
borisiii said:
I noticed that when using 3G, images in mobile safari load at lower quality, presumably to reduce data consumed and speed up surfing on 3G. It gives web pages a sort of 90s look. I noticed the effect when I was viewing a website with an image of a map, but the rendering over 3G was too low quality for me to be able to read it.

Does your carrier do it - and do you think it's a good thing?

Attached images: An image from MR rendered over wifi, 3G on o2, and 3G on T-mobile. It seems that T-mobile reduces quality the most.
Click to expand...
I have never noticed that on AT&T in all the years I have had an iPhone.

Proxy compression servers were used, I think, by tmob here in the USA a while ago if you were on the ultra cheap data plan. But that was prior to 3G so it helped rather than hindered.

Sprint used to use them too. Back when 14.4kbps was it for mobile data you pretty much needed it.

But now with 3G? I wouldn't think so but it also appears to be much less compression than I remember from years past.

I would save each image to the camera roll and get them to a pc to see by how many bytes they differ

Good eye BTW... I had to do a double-take at first to figure out what you meant!



Michael
 
wordoflife said:
You got it backwards. American carriers would be more than happy to give you the higher quality data so you run out of your data in your bucket faster (so they can charge you overages)
Click to expand...

Ha I hadn't thought of that. Why reduce your customers' data usage when you can charge them more for using lots of it?

Tinmania said:
I would save each image to the camera roll and get them to a pc to see by how many bytes they differ
Click to expand...

The standard wifi version is 18151 bytes, and the o2 version is 7842. The T-Mobile version looked the crappiest so I imagine it will be lower still, but I can't be bothered to swap the sims over again to check – the T-Mobile sim is from my iPad. That said, I'll settle for T-Mobile's compressed images over 3G since I'm only paying £1.25 per month for iPad data (about $2 US).
 
Last edited:
borisiii said:
The standard wifi version is 18151 bytes, and the o2 version is 7842. The T-Mobile version looked the crappiest so I imagine it will be lower still, but I can't be bothered to swap the sims over again to check – the T-Mobile sim is from my iPad. That said, I'll settle for T-Mobile's compressed images over 3G since I'm only paying £1.25 per month for iPad data (about $2 US).
Click to expand...
I wouldn't mind either. And that is not "too" bad I don't think I would even notice it most of the time. I SURELY remember noticing it back in the day (that image would have been about 82 bytes lol).




Michael
 
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

That's not the carrier or the iPhone. Some mobile sites use full resolution textures and images for their mobile sites, while others use low resolution substitutes to facilitate faster loading.
 
w00t951 said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

That's not the carrier or the iPhone. Some mobile sites use full resolution textures and images for their mobile sites, while others use low resolution substitutes to facilitate faster loading.
Click to expand...

Are you saying this particular web site serves a different image based on which ISP the customer is using? I can understand mobile vs non-mobile, but to give one image to T-Mobile customers, another to O2, and another for AT&T users is a little extreme.
 
w00t951 said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

That's not the carrier or the iPhone. Some mobile sites use full resolution textures and images for their mobile sites, while others use low resolution substitutes to facilitate faster loading.
Click to expand...
That's not the case here. OP has the same image (from MacRumors) loaded on O2, T-Mobile and WiFi. WiFi has the full quality image, O2 takes it down a notch and then T-Mobile looks like crap.

I made a compilation of OP's WiFi, O2, and T-Mobile screenshots and my Verizon screenshot. Verizon looks exactly like the WiFi version.
 

Attachments

  • Untitled-1.jpg
    Untitled-1.jpg
    853.5 KB · Views: 93
w00t951 said:
Wirelessly posted (Mozilla/5.0 (iPhone; CPU iPhone OS 5_0_1 like Mac OS X) AppleWebKit/534.46 (KHTML, like Gecko) Version/5.1 Mobile/9A405 Safari/7534.48.3)

That's not the carrier or the iPhone. Some mobile sites use full resolution textures and images for their mobile sites, while others use low resolution substitutes to facilitate faster loading.
Click to expand...

OMG... is this the "leave your brain at the door" thread?????



Michael
 
this, perhaps, is thee oddest, most stupidity filled thread I've seen in awhile.

wow.
 
Theyre probably billing you for the uncompressed data that hits there compression servers.....then reducing it and sending it to you to reduce strain on their network :)

Request ----> 20kb of image processed & billed --> 10kb data sent to you --> profit :p
 
Last edited:
You must log in or register to reply here.
Register on MacRumors! This sidebar will go away, and you'll see fewer ads.
Top Bottom
Back