Poor image quality with mobile broadband
Some of you may have noticed that when you’re browsing the web with mobile broadband that your image quality is poorer then when you use normal fixed line broadband. This is due to optimisation by Vodafone – they’ve got a box in their network (supplied by a company called Bytemobile) that intercepts web requests and optimises them to reduce the size of the request so that web pages load faster and use less bandwidth on the network.
This optimisation is done at a number of levels, but the most noticeable is the lossey compression applied to images. This means that the size of the images you download are much smaller than the original file, but the quality suffers – resulting in blocky, fuzzy or grainy images. The technical name for this is ‘compression artifacts’ – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Compression_artifact for more details.
Improving Image Quality
Quick Fix
There’s a number of ways you can improve the image quality on a web page, the easiest is to hold down shift on your keyboard whilst clicking on the refresh button in your web browser. This will cause your browser to send a ‘no-cache’ header – the optimiser sees this header and sends the original, untouched web page to your browser. This fix however doesn’t work on Safari.
For the nerds out there I’m pretty sure you can tinkle with Firefox’s headers via a plug in and force the no-cache header to be sent every time.
Windows Client
If you want a more permanent fix, you can download the full Vodafone dashboard client from here . This software includes the Bytemobile optimiser client, and allows you to change your optimisation settings.
Once you’ve installed the client, click on settings, then optimisation. On this screen you’ll find the option to set the image quality to ‘highest’.
Mac OS Client
There’s no official client for Mac OS users, however the guys over at http://aitne.com/ have created an app called ‘ByteMe Optimizer’. This tiny little app runs in the background and kicks the Vodafone optimiser into returning uncompressed pages.