Google Asia Pacific Blog - Field test in Indonesia: can mobile web pages load faster?

No one likes waiting. Whether you're looking for the latest news, the right answer, or the phone number for that coffee shop you left your bag at, faster is better. Unfortunately, in Indonesia, where network connections are often slow, getting information like this on your phone can be tough, and frustrating.

So we're exploring some new ways to speed things up. In two weeks, we'll start to field test a new feature which we hope will do just that. If you're in Indonesia, with an Android phone and on a slow connection, like 2G, you should start to see pages loading a whole lot faster, while using far less data, via your Chrome or Android browser. There's more on how this works on our webmasters blog.

It's still early days, but our initial tests show that these new light pages load four times faster and use 80% less data than before. Of course, if you'd prefer to see the original page, you can choose that option at the top of your page.

With over 88 million people in Indonesia searching the web from a phone, we're working hard to make access faster and more affordable. After all, if each of those 88 million Indonesian smartphone users spends just 1 extra second a day waiting for a page to load, that adds up to more than two and a half years of people waiting, every day. That's more time than it took to build Jakarta's 88,000 seat Gelora Bung Karno Stadium.

Posted by Hiroto Tokusei, Product Manager