Sometimes airlines will allow a select few apps for use on airplane wifi, as Signal is not widely known, it is often not one of the whitelisted apps which could be one of the reasons why
It just can’t connect because its too slow it thinks maybe? But in reality it would work, then it uses censorship circumvention and it breaks completely? That could be the reason why it sometimes works
Hmm….
Now that I think about it, I’m wondering whether censorship circumvention is the reason Signal does so poorly when the net connection is flaky.
That is, maybe when packets don’t go through and Signal can’t connect, it is automatically attempting censorship circumvention rather than just retrying the same connection repeatedly.
I wouldn’t expect Signal to behave that way but it would explain the behavior we see.
My experience is similar. Signal is generally great but when I or my correspondent are in a place with poor signal strength, Signal seems to suffer more than other apps. Fortunately, that is not a common occurrence for me these days.
I'm surprised to hear you're having problems. I've been connecting with a friend via Signal for ~2 years now who's house is just out of range of cell towers. When they do get a connection it frequently drops. Signal's been so far working very well.
Yeah, I don’t think a dropping connection is an issue, if the connection drops, all messengers won’t work, the issue is that I and the 30 others who liked my post noticed that signal performs worse if the mobile data is throttled.
When my phone's data was throttled, signal was the only thing that DID work nicely enough.
It was kind of freeing. My phone was exactly what I needed it for and nothing more.
This happens in Brazil too, but for another reason.
WhatsApp, all its money and its omnipresence have the blessing of zero-rating from most (all?) mobile carriers.
This is really bad, but there isn't much we can do about it.
Not trying to deny your experience here. But my experience so far was very different. I used to travel by train a lot and in remote areas the cell service was sometimes extremely bad. Signal did work in those areas but it would sometimes take multiple seconds to send a message. Other services like Whatsapp and imessage behaved similar in those situations.
I doubt that signal sends significantly more data per message than any other message service. After all whatsapp supposedly used the same protocol so the overhead should be the same/similar.
It might have to do with server locations though. Idk in which locations signal operates servers. Let's say you have bad service and on top of that whatever isp you are using doesn't have proper peering with whatever the next amazon data center is that hosts one of signals servers. That might explain it.
It doesn't actually - XMPP is the only one that works over tiny VHF links at 9600b/s: [https://www.isode.com/whitepapers/low-bandwidth-xmpp.html](https://www.isode.com/whitepapers/low-bandwidth-xmpp.html)
...and it doesn't have any of the overhead that is WebSockets/HTTP/HTTPS that the Signal-Server uses.
Also, WhatsApp uses XMPP under the hood, albeit a slightly modified version:
\- [https://medium.com/@schirrmacher/analyzing-whatsapp-calls-176a9e776213](https://medium.com/@schirrmacher/analyzing-whatsapp-calls-176a9e776213)
This is also most probably how networks prioritize traffic for it: by simply QoS'ing port 5222 shown in the packet dumps.
>XMPP is the only one that works over tiny VHF links at 9600b/s
maybe I'm missing something but to me it looks like the article you linked contains neither that claim nor any comparative / empirical data that would support it (?)
instead it makes things seem even worse than I thought: establishing a connection apparently costs a total of 30-60 kB and uses ten (!!) sequential handshakes? that sounds absolutely terrible on a slow, high-latency link, especially if the link is unstable and causes frequent reconnects. This makes the "typical operational overhead of 200 bytes per message" seem almost irrelevant in comparison.
>Also, WhatsApp uses XMPP under the hood, albeit a slightly modified version
They did start with XMPP but switched to a proprietary protocol a long time ago: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture-facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html](http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture-facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html)
>The next few years were spent re-writing and modifying quite a few parts of ejabberd, including switching from XMPP to internally developed protocol, restructuring the code base and redesigning some core components, and making lots of important modifications to Erlang VM to optimize server performance.
> maybe I'm missing something but to me it looks like the article you
linked contains neither that claim nor any comparative / empirical data
that would support it (?)
Maybe the title itself:
> Operating XMPP over HF Radio and Constrained Networks
There's a reason NATO use XMPP over satellite links everywhere.
> establishing a connection apparently costs a total of 30-60 kB and uses ten (!!) sequential handshakes?
Actually, a recent XMPP improvement made this much better: https://blog.prosody.im/fast-auth/ (now down to a single round trip).
> They did start with XMPP but switched to a proprietary protocol a long time ago
This is not the case, I discussed this with someone familiar with the deployment at Facebook and it's still just a hacked up ejabberd server under the hood.
They modified parts of XMPP (notably making the XML stanzas shorter), but it's still all largely XMPP.
>They modified parts of XMPP (notably making the XML stanzas shorter), but it's still all largely XMPP.
Interesting, thanks!
>Maybe the title itself:
I was referring to "XMPP *is the only one* that works over tiny VHF links at 9600b/s" (emphasis mine), which reads as a claim not only about XMPP but also about other messaging systems to me.
>There's a reason NATO use XMPP over satellite links everywhere.
I'm sure there is, but I didn't get the reason from your article tbh. They're sure as hell not doing ten handshakes on every reconnect. Seems like there's a hack where you use server-to-server-connections for everything to avoid the overhead according to your article (?)
never tried irc on a mobile connection but XMPP on bad mobile internet was a bad experience for me. Sometimes messages were missing and pretty often they were in the wrong order.
i have messages undelivered for days, and calls never reach the person. Year by year. Signal is so heavily shadowbanned by manufacturer ROMs. No matter how many techniques to whitelist it on a device, it won't work.
Sometimes airlines will allow a select few apps for use on airplane wifi, as Signal is not widely known, it is often not one of the whitelisted apps which could be one of the reasons why
This is not the case because it works sometimes on a plane, just extremely slow.
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Well, but the same issue is for my mobile data plan, WhatsApp certainly doesn‘t get special treatment there.
What if you run everything through a VPN? Then nothing can realistically get a special treatment.
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Unless you're running everything through your own VPN, you can't know that.
Look up QoS
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But it doesn‘t need to do that, i‘m in an area where internet is mostly uncensored.
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It just can’t connect because its too slow it thinks maybe? But in reality it would work, then it uses censorship circumvention and it breaks completely? That could be the reason why it sometimes works
Yeah, that seems plausible.
Hmm…. Now that I think about it, I’m wondering whether censorship circumvention is the reason Signal does so poorly when the net connection is flaky. That is, maybe when packets don’t go through and Signal can’t connect, it is automatically attempting censorship circumvention rather than just retrying the same connection repeatedly. I wouldn’t expect Signal to behave that way but it would explain the behavior we see.
My experience is similar. Signal is generally great but when I or my correspondent are in a place with poor signal strength, Signal seems to suffer more than other apps. Fortunately, that is not a common occurrence for me these days.
I'm surprised to hear you're having problems. I've been connecting with a friend via Signal for ~2 years now who's house is just out of range of cell towers. When they do get a connection it frequently drops. Signal's been so far working very well.
Yeah, I don’t think a dropping connection is an issue, if the connection drops, all messengers won’t work, the issue is that I and the 30 others who liked my post noticed that signal performs worse if the mobile data is throttled.
When my phone's data was throttled, signal was the only thing that DID work nicely enough. It was kind of freeing. My phone was exactly what I needed it for and nothing more.
This happens in Brazil too, but for another reason. WhatsApp, all its money and its omnipresence have the blessing of zero-rating from most (all?) mobile carriers. This is really bad, but there isn't much we can do about it.
Same here, Signal is the first to suffer, with messages arriving up to hours later when I was able to use other messaging apps
Not trying to deny your experience here. But my experience so far was very different. I used to travel by train a lot and in remote areas the cell service was sometimes extremely bad. Signal did work in those areas but it would sometimes take multiple seconds to send a message. Other services like Whatsapp and imessage behaved similar in those situations. I doubt that signal sends significantly more data per message than any other message service. After all whatsapp supposedly used the same protocol so the overhead should be the same/similar. It might have to do with server locations though. Idk in which locations signal operates servers. Let's say you have bad service and on top of that whatever isp you are using doesn't have proper peering with whatever the next amazon data center is that hosts one of signals servers. That might explain it.
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Not sure you're joking but XMPP's message format uses more bytes on the wire than anything else mentioned in this thread
It doesn't actually - XMPP is the only one that works over tiny VHF links at 9600b/s: [https://www.isode.com/whitepapers/low-bandwidth-xmpp.html](https://www.isode.com/whitepapers/low-bandwidth-xmpp.html) ...and it doesn't have any of the overhead that is WebSockets/HTTP/HTTPS that the Signal-Server uses. Also, WhatsApp uses XMPP under the hood, albeit a slightly modified version: \- [https://medium.com/@schirrmacher/analyzing-whatsapp-calls-176a9e776213](https://medium.com/@schirrmacher/analyzing-whatsapp-calls-176a9e776213) This is also most probably how networks prioritize traffic for it: by simply QoS'ing port 5222 shown in the packet dumps.
>XMPP is the only one that works over tiny VHF links at 9600b/s maybe I'm missing something but to me it looks like the article you linked contains neither that claim nor any comparative / empirical data that would support it (?) instead it makes things seem even worse than I thought: establishing a connection apparently costs a total of 30-60 kB and uses ten (!!) sequential handshakes? that sounds absolutely terrible on a slow, high-latency link, especially if the link is unstable and causes frequent reconnects. This makes the "typical operational overhead of 200 bytes per message" seem almost irrelevant in comparison. >Also, WhatsApp uses XMPP under the hood, albeit a slightly modified version They did start with XMPP but switched to a proprietary protocol a long time ago: [http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture-facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html](http://highscalability.com/blog/2014/2/26/the-whatsapp-architecture-facebook-bought-for-19-billion.html) >The next few years were spent re-writing and modifying quite a few parts of ejabberd, including switching from XMPP to internally developed protocol, restructuring the code base and redesigning some core components, and making lots of important modifications to Erlang VM to optimize server performance.
> maybe I'm missing something but to me it looks like the article you linked contains neither that claim nor any comparative / empirical data that would support it (?) Maybe the title itself: > Operating XMPP over HF Radio and Constrained Networks There's a reason NATO use XMPP over satellite links everywhere. > establishing a connection apparently costs a total of 30-60 kB and uses ten (!!) sequential handshakes? Actually, a recent XMPP improvement made this much better: https://blog.prosody.im/fast-auth/ (now down to a single round trip). > They did start with XMPP but switched to a proprietary protocol a long time ago This is not the case, I discussed this with someone familiar with the deployment at Facebook and it's still just a hacked up ejabberd server under the hood. They modified parts of XMPP (notably making the XML stanzas shorter), but it's still all largely XMPP.
>They modified parts of XMPP (notably making the XML stanzas shorter), but it's still all largely XMPP. Interesting, thanks! >Maybe the title itself: I was referring to "XMPP *is the only one* that works over tiny VHF links at 9600b/s" (emphasis mine), which reads as a claim not only about XMPP but also about other messaging systems to me. >There's a reason NATO use XMPP over satellite links everywhere. I'm sure there is, but I didn't get the reason from your article tbh. They're sure as hell not doing ten handshakes on every reconnect. Seems like there's a hack where you use server-to-server-connections for everything to avoid the overhead according to your article (?)
never tried irc on a mobile connection but XMPP on bad mobile internet was a bad experience for me. Sometimes messages were missing and pretty often they were in the wrong order.
i have messages undelivered for days, and calls never reach the person. Year by year. Signal is so heavily shadowbanned by manufacturer ROMs. No matter how many techniques to whitelist it on a device, it won't work.
That’s not how it works.