I'm about to head out on a mission in Liberia where bandwidth is very
scarce. Our forms and aggregator are hosted on a server in the US.
Even though our aggregator's webpage is designed to be low footprint
and ODK itself transfers not very much data, I'm still expecting
things to be slow.
I am sure other folks have experienced this. Do people have tips or
tricks on how best to survive it? I am planning to design the forms
before I set off. Other than that??
Many thanks.
Tom
i just got back from kenya and safaricom 3g and edge were pretty
reliable. dunno what the situation is like in liberia, but you'll
probably be fine.
in case you are not fine, increasing timeouts on network clients (like
web browsers) helps. it's also a good idea to hit the network at
off-peak periods.
If you're working with quite a lot of data you might want to consider
transferring collected information off each device's SD card, putting it
on a CD/DVD and mailing it to someone who can transfer it to Aggregate
for you. Sometimes sneakernet is more efficient in situations where
bandwidth is particularly hard to come by.
Group Complete (which is ODK compatible) is going to have a
device-to-device sync feature fairly soon that will allow people to
move/share collected data between mobile units without relying on an
Internet connection. This feature probably won't come out in time for
you and I can't say whether it would make your particularly situation
much easier (it might make things faster to aggregate the data locally
at a single point before copying it to send).
Yaw's suggestion to increase timeouts is a good one.
Cheers,
Matt
My advice, if it is feasible is to identify a set of wifi locations where
the devices can be brought regularly - this can add some complexity to the
work flow with your people, but the data connection is less problematic than
configuring for over 3G.
James
If you're working with quite a lot of data you might want to consider
transferring collected information off each device's SD card, putting it on
a CD/DVD and mailing it to someone who can transfer it to Aggregate for you.
Sometimes sneakernet is more efficient in situations where bandwidth is
particularly hard to come by.Group Complete (which is ODK compatible) is going to have a
device-to-device sync feature fairly soon that will allow people to
move/share collected data between mobile units without relying on an
Internet connection. This feature probably won't come out in time for you
and I can't say whether it would make your particularly situation much
easier (it might make things faster to aggregate the data locally at a
single point before copying it to send).Yaw's suggestion to increase timeouts is a good one.
Cheers,
Matt
Matt Adams
Radical Dynamic
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