Web Experience in Mobile Networks: Lessons from Two Million Page Visits

Measuring and characterizing web page performance is a challenging task. When it comes to the mobile world, the highly varying technology characteristics coupled with the opaque network configuration make it even more difficult. Aiming at reproducibility, we present a large scale measurements study of web page performance collected in eleven commercial mobile networks spanning four countries. We build a dataset of nearly two million web browsing sessions to we shed light on the impact of different web protocols, browsers, and mobile technologies on the web performance. We find that the impact of mobile broadband access is sizeable. For example, the median page load time using mobile broadband increases by a third compared to wired access. Mobility clearly stresses the system, with handover causing the most evident performance penalties. Contrariwise, our measurements show that the adoption of HTTP/2 and QUIC has practically negligible impact. Our work highlights the importance of large-scale measurements. Even with our controlled setup, the complexity of the mobile web ecosystem is challenging to untangle. For this, we are releasing the dataset as open data for validation and further research. We also release together with the datasets we collected the scripts we use to produce the analysis we present in the paper. Please use plot_all.sh script to generate the plots in the paper, using the separate scripts from the "scripts" archive.  Should you use any of these resources, please also make an attribution using the following reference (provided here in bibtex format): @inproceedings{rajiullah2019web, title={{Web Experience in Mobile Networks: Lessons from Two Million Page Visits}}, author={Rajiullah, Mohammad and Lutu, Andra and Khatouni, Ali Safari and Fida, Mah-Rukh and Mellia, Marco and Brunstrom, Anna and Alay, Ozgu and Alfredsson, Stefan and Mancuso, Vincenzo}, booktitle={The World Wide Web Conference}, pages={1532--1543}, year={2019}, organization={ACM},  address = {San Francisco, CA, USA},  keywords = {Web Experience,  HTTP2, QUIC, TCP, Mobile Broadband, Measurements} }