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As Southeast Asia becomes increasingly wired, smartphone-filled and social-media obsessed, a Google study shows internet speeds still lag behind.
In a post on the Google Analytics blog earlier this month measuring web speeds around the world, Indonesia – the third largest Facebook market in the world – ranks as one of the lowest for web page loading speeding at an average of 20.8 seconds. This is more than six times slower than South Korea, where a website takes 3.4 seconds to load, one of the world’s fastest, and China where a website takes 6.8 second to load.
Thailand and Malaysia fared slightly – but not significantly – better, with a page taking 9.6 and 14.3 seconds to load through a computer browser respectively.
But as mobile Internet grows dramatically in the Southeast Asian region, the pace of mobile Internet cannot keep up, with an experience “about 1.5x slower than [the] desktop experience,” according to Google’s statistics. This is especially pertinent for users in countries like Indonesia, where a young population is accessing the Internet for the first time through their Blackberries or iPhones rather than their desktops and usage of mobile social networking sites like Twitter are among the highest in the world.
“That’s a very big difference, and that is even taking into account that many popular sites are already optimizing for the mobile visitor,” said the report from Google Analytics.
Almost all of Southeast Asia’s biggest economies ranked on the bottom of the scale comparing mobile internet speeds – including Indonesia and Singapore at 12.9 seconds, Malaysia at 12.7 and Thailand at 17.4.
Even in wealthy Singapore where technology infrastructure is ahead of its neighbors, many users still complain of slow Internet connections when accessing websites through their phones. Unlike India, one of the first markets in Asia to be 4G-enabled, Singapore will only be 4G-ready in 2016.
Still, this has not stopped users from snapping up latest smartphone models. The growth of Southeast Asia’s smartphone market has been staggering – with nearly 7.7 million units of phones bought in the first three months of this year in the region’s key markets of Singapore, Cambodia, Indonesia, Malaysia,the Philippines, Thailand and Vietnam, according to market research company GfK Asia. Spikes in demand ranged anywhere from 40 percent over 400 percent over the same period last year in different markets across the region.
Indonesia – the region’s largest smartphone market – chalked up sales exceeding US1.4 billion in smartphones last year, according to GfK Asia, and markets like Singapore and Malaysia have a smartphone penetration rate of 88% , translating into nine out of ten of the overall population.
From Cape Canaveral, Florida, Navy Commander Alan Bartlett Shepard Jr. is launched into space aboard the Freedom 7 space capsule, becoming the first American astronaut to travel into space. The suborbital flight, which lasted 15 minutes and reached a height of 116 miles into the atmosphere, was a major triumph for the National Aeronautics and Space Administration (NASA).
NASA was established in 1958 to keep U.S. space efforts abreast of recent Soviet achievements, such as the launching of the world's first artificial satellite--Sputnik 1--in 1957.
In the late 1950s and early 1960s, the two superpowers raced to become the first country to put a man in space and return him to Earth. On April 12, 1961, the Soviet space program won the race when cosmonaut Yuri Gagarin was launched into space, put in orbit around the planet, and safely returned to Earth. One month later, Shepard's suborbital flight restored faith in the U.S. space program.
NASA continued to trail the Soviets closely until the late 1960s and the successes of the Apollo lunar program. In July 1969, the Americans took a giant leap forward with Apollo 11, a three-stage spacecraft that took U.S. astronauts to the surface of the moon and returned them to Earth. On February 5, 1971, Alan Shepard, the first American in space, became the fifth astronaut to walk on the moon as part of the Apollo 14 lunar landing mission.
A few years ago, someone hacked into my Google Account and took control of all the data associated with it, including my emails, videos I'd uploaded to YouTube, my family photos on Picasa, my address book, and even the search queries that I'd been typing into Google for years.
It was a scary moment because my other non-Google accounts like Twitter and Facebook were also associated with that Gmail address, so there was a big risk of losing them too.
Fortunately the story had a happy ending as the support team at Google quickly identified the breach and restored access to my account pretty soon.
All this happened even though I used complex and lengthy passwords. There is a definite need to add another layer of security. Here are some suggestions:
The easiest option is to turn on 2-step verification for your Google Account and then install the Google Authenticator app on your mobile phone. This is available for Android, iOS and BlackBerry devices. When you are trying to sign into your Google Account from another computer or mobile device, you will need the account password as before, but you will also have to enter a unique time-dependent code generated by the Authenticator app on your mobile phone. So if someone manages to get hold of your Google password, say through a key logger software, they still won't be able to gain access without your mobile phone.
If the Authenticator app is not available for your mobile phone, you can still enable the 2-step verification. Google will send you the unique code through a text message or a voice call.
If you are planning to access your Google Account from a public computer, you might consider using a virtual on-screen keyboard to enter your Google credentials. Go to the Run box in the Windows Start Menu and type osk.exe to activate the virtual keyboard. But the best method to bypass key loggers on public computers is a Live Linux CD you can boot the 'unknown' machine using the Live CD and it will leave no traces whatsoever once you exit the session.
It's also a good idea to check the list of services that are authorized to access your Google Account. Some of these services may have access to your Google data, so it makes sense to revoke access to those that you no longer use. Google recently introduced a new service Accounts Activity where it sends you monthly reports on how you are signing into your accounts and from where. You may want to enable this as well.
One more thing: If you ever lose access to your Google Account, you'll be required to answer a series of questions to verify your identity. Things like who invited you to open your Gmail account or when did you create your Gmail account. Keep these details handy somewhere as they may speed up the account recovery process.
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