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An edu-tech and game developer shares how investing in good internet infrastructure and a speedy user experience can make or break your digital startup

Running a tech startup in an emerging economy has its own set of challenges, whether you are targeting the global market, or even if you are going hyper-local. Talent-wise, the region has plenty of capable professionals. However, apart from funding, access to adequate infrastructure is a hurdle that many technopreneurs have to overcome. As speed now weighs heavily as part of consumer wants in a mobile web, you should explore all available technologies at your disposal in order to compete at a global level.

In my experience in the fields of educational technology and game development, we had to deal with bandwidth limitations, especially where last-mile connectivity was involved. This was only on a country-level, though. Imagine if you cannot properly deliver content and services across geographies because of infrastructure challenges.

Slow and expensive internet facilities

Most emerging economies in Southeast Asia suffer from slow Internet speeds, especially when compared to more developed countries in the Asia Pacific region.

To illustrate, Japan and Korea top out at 81.4 Mbps and 59.3 Mbps, respectively while the Philippines has to make do with 3.6 Mbps average. (Singapore remains to be an exception as it is an established ecommerce hub in the region.) Not only is the Internet connection slow, but for countries like Indonesia, Philippines, Myanmar and Laos, speed also comes with a hefty price tag. Some service providers and telcos even charge a higher rate for business users, compared to residential or individual accounts.

Also Read: Singapore has world’s fastest Internet, but South Korea has the best: Akamai report

I had to address this challenge firsthand when I was a product manager at an edutech firm. Our servers were in the US, and latency killed the UX for our users in the central and southern Philippines — it took 20 hops for packets to reach users. It didn’t help that schools’ connections were also unbearably slow.

When I was developing games, we had to rely on BaaS and cloud hosting for asset bundles, and even those were slow during testing with local and international publishers

Internet speed and cost can really stymie productivity. This often leaves some ventures with little choice but to make do with existing options and piggyback on established technologies. For example, small businesses  might opt to use Wix.com or Facebook Pages for their businesses, instead of self-hosted websites with their own domain names.

Not having those necessities is bad representation even for traditional businesses, more so for digital businesses. We also see this trend apparent in e-commerce, where merchants opt to participate in aggregators rather than put up their own e-commerce channels, probably best exemplified by the rise of Amazon clones Lazada and Zalora in the region.

Speed is key in mobile web

Speed ranks high in what customers want these days – speedy page loads, speedy checkout processes, and speedy deliveries, more so with the emergence of mobile as driver of Internet traffic. A Google study has found that 53 percent of users abandon mobile websites if these load longer than 3 seconds. Google and Facebook are also pushing for faster browsing experiences, both hinting on traffic and visibility penalties to advertisers with slow-loading sites.

Also Read: 4 handy tips on delivering quality web experience to customers

Financially, being slow translates to lost opportunities. An e-commerce website that makes $100,000 a day can lose up to $2.5 million in a year for a second page load delay. Downtime caused by cyberattacks can rack up to $100,000 an hour in losses.

Depending on the country, hosting on local data centres can be expensive, and this leads a number of businesses to get hosting services from offshore datacentres. The problem is, if the audience is local and the host servers are halfway around the world, connections are bound to experience high latency resulting in slow page loading and response times.

Just google the key terms ‘Asian server latency’ and you will end up with plenty of results containing rants from online gaming forums and threads complaining about poor user experience due to high latency. Perhaps no other group rages more against lag than online gamers though users and consumers in general hate delays. Thus, it is key for digital ventures to consider ways to deliver better browsing experiences.

Optimising for speed

There are a multitude of factors that affect page load speed and responsiveness but there are also plenty of options to optimise, like minification and compression. On the coding end, developers can make sure that the code uses computing resources and bandwidth well. Designers could also deliver user experiences (UX) that are as efficient and intuitive as possible.

While developers can work out optimisations and designers deliver optimal UX, infrastructure also weighs in a great deal. Investing in a good hosting provider with reliable uptime and fast server response is a must. You can also shorten the distance between the datacentre location and your target audience to reduce latency. A way to work around worrying about server specifications and is to opt of cloud hosting since it allows you to scale up or down anytime.

Facebook also suggests using a “high-quality content delivery network” (CDN) to help deliver content faster. CDNs are geographically distributed servers that host copies of content so that users trying to access the content will do so from a nearer source. CDN provider Incapsula notes that even a free user can gain as much as 20 points in Google PageSpeed score and shave off a complete second in page load times. The great thing is that there are free CDNs available, which can empower your startup to scale from zero to growth.

Benefits of speeding up

Optimising for speed can benefit a variety of ventures especially now in the age where content could mean just about anything. Compliance with Google’s and Facebook’s speed requirement could mean more visibility in search and advertising.

For e-commerce, faster load times of catalog details (including high resolution product pictures) and overall response time could mean fewer abandoned carts and better sales. For video content developers, this could bring faster streaming to audiences. For teams that build software and games, you can ensure more engaged gamers with minimal or no lag. You can also expect faster deployment of installer packages, downloadable content, and asset bundles.

Also Read: 10 simple hacks for preventing abandoned shopping carts

Aside from performance gains, improving infrastructure brings about other benefits as well. With CDNs, many service providers package their products alongside security and Distributed Denial-of-Service (DDoS) protection.

Massive DDoS attacks are a huge cybersecurity issue of late. Just recently, core Internet services provider Dyn which serves Twitter, Spotify, Netflix and Reddit, was hit by a massive DDoS attack that piggybacked on the internet-of-things that, in turn, affected all those sites. Interestingly, majority of botnet traffic used in these DDoS attacks were reported to come from Asia Pacific countries like China, South Korea, Taiwan, and Vietnam.

While it does not necessarily mean that these countries were behind or directly involved the attack, it just goes to show that compromised devices and networks are rampant in the region. Adding another layer of security to your existing infrastructure could definitely help ventures avoid being part of the problem.

Think ‘investment’ rather than ‘cost’

As a digital venture, one of the key concerns is cost, but in technology, this comes with the territory. The good thing is that products and pricing also evolves with the developments in business needs. Services like hosting, CDNs and security used to be significant investments. However, with the rise of cloud-based services, the costs have become much more manageable that not availing of these services can actually become a bad business move due to potential losses and missed opportunities. And these can actually be addressed with proper investments.

Many ventures opt to delay certain investments, but in tech, certain areas can leave a fledgling business exposed if not addressed sooner. With the shifting consumer and threat landscapes, businesses should assess all the pros and cons of their tech investments. Investing in work and technologies that optimise for speed should be one of them.

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The views expressed here are of the author’s, and e27 may not necessarily subscribe to them. e27 invites members from Asia’s tech industry and startup community to share their honest opinions and expert knowledge with our readers. If you are interested in sharing your point of view, submit your post here.

Image Credit: Pixabay

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