Team Roar
Sri Lanka loves its social media. Facebook alone has some 4 million Sri Lankan users according to some sources, and this number is growing fast. The average user can spend over 20 minutes of their time every day on Facebook alone. There are those, of course, who spend a lot more time than that on social media, especially if they need to keep in touch with friends and family, or need to stay socially connected as part of their work profile. Unsurprisingly, perhaps, the majority of people who access social media do it while on the go, and through their mobile devices.
People tend to access social media through their phones
Taking into consideration the sheer number of social media users in Sri Lanka, and the amount of time spent online, it can be pretty frustrating if access is slow. And social media browsing typically can be slow.
Part of this problem lies in geographical distance. It can take a few hundred milliseconds to send a packet of data from a mobile phone in Sri Lanka to Facebook servers in the United States, for example. This travel time or latency might not seem like too much, but over time it can build up into severe lag, creating long pauses when users access networks like Facebook. Pictures might load slower, page transitions take more time, and messaging can slow down. That can be annoying.
Speeding Up Social Media
To address this issue, Dialog has worked on ways to improve customer experience while browsing social media. To reduce latency times, Dialog invested in infrastructure that locally caches data in Sri Lanka. This local caching means that part of the data from social media sites is stored on Sri Lankan soil, allowing for much lower latency times. Data packets won’t have to travel all the way from US based servers to Sri Lanka, instead loading from servers that are practically on site. The obvious result of this is much faster load and browsing times. Videos won’t take as long to load, pages load and refresh faster, and pictures, posts and check-ins all happen at a much faster pace.
Local caching is usually done in countries to make it easier for users to navigate popular sites like Facebook, Twitter, and blogging platforms. There are thousands of servers spread across the world, making it much easier for users to access their own content and browse the network. Dialog implementing the system in Sri Lanka makes it much easier for users here to access and use social networks.
This improved speed and service can be enjoyed by all Dialog customers, whether it be on mobile internet or their fixed broadband connections and whether they access these sites through their mobile phones, tablets or PCs. After all, why waste time waiting for pages to load, when you can enjoy browsing instead?
