Facebook has pretty much reached saturation here in the tech-saturated west, and so its next target—the target of many other tech companies as well—are emerging markets. But it can be hard to really grasp what it's like to live with the sort of tech that's available in India until you do it yourself, which is why Facebook's starting up 2G Tuesdays to foist slow internet on its employees.

Slow internet doesn't have to mean slow-loading apps and pages. If websites are appropriately efficient and barebones, they can be pretty usable even on slow or data-throttled connections. That's the idea behind Internet.org, a joint project between Facebook and several other companies. It's a project that's equal parts benevolent and troubling; Internet.org will let those in developing nations access highly-optimized webpages for free, but ultimately Facebook holds the keys to who is let in, which goes against the concept of "net neutrality" and sets the social networking giant up for an unfair advantage.

According to Business Insider, Facebook's 2G Tuesdays will give employees a chance to see what this feels like first-hand, and help them understand not only how slow 2G can be, but how Facebook performs on such a connection.

For context, even the best 2G speeds tend to top out around one Megabit per second (Mbps). 3G is closer to 6 Mbps, and 4G (what your phone probably uses) can get up to 15 Mbps. The average internet speed in the United States, meanwhile, is about 11 Mbps, actually quite low for such a teched-up nation.

Fortunately (or unfortunately?) the name "2G Tuesdays" is a bit of a misnomer. Should employees opt in to the experiment—it's not mandatory—the 2G connection only lasts for an hour. But hey, you've got to get some work done, right?

Source: Business Insider

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