Limited Connectivity BBC News

Thursday, 24 July 2008 at 10:28 - Blog

Further to my previous post about the problems of occasionally having limited connectivity:

One site that seems to deal with this brilliantly is BBC News, which serves up degraded JPEG images when I'm connected via GPRS. How do they know? Or is this functionality implemented by Vodafone's proxy?

Either way, it's very clever and much appreciated.

Tagged as: , ,

#1 Jeremy Pearson on 24 Jul 2008 at 23:39

It's almost surely Vodafone, using similar technology to OnSpeed. In fact, OnSpeed have moved their technology onto mobile platforms now that most computers are broadband enabled, so expect to see it happening more and more.

The BBC, however, will probably have noted that your IP address is within Vodafone's address space, but that doesn't tell them anything about the device or browser you're using, unless they've also noted that your Vista laptop is speaking TCPv6.

#2 ian on 29 Jul 2008 at 17:43

You're right Jez, it's definitely Vodafone doing this. What's even neater is that they're injecting some javascript into the pages such that hovering over an image and pressing Shift-R asynchronously replaces the compressed version with the original image.

I think this deserves a separate blog post..

Leave a Comment