Airline websites and slow internet connections

[occasional]

My normal internet connection is at 56kb through a dongle.

I have found that two airline websites - BA and Jet2 - simply do not work over this connection, although other secure websites appear to work satisfactorily.

Could someone explain why these websites have problems ? Is it that they use an unsuitable encryption protocol or does the problem lie in their baseline computers ?

[Capetonian]

I have had problems with KLM under the same circumstances and would also be interested in an explanation. At the same time as I had the problem with KLM, I was able to complete a booking on Easyjet.

[mixture]

What is your definition of "do not work" ? Do you get nothing at all ? Part loading ? Problems with transactions ?

Is it that they use an unsuitable encryption protocol

Nope.

does the problem lie in their baseline computers ?

Each site will likely have a different architecture, different server software, different load balancing mechanisms, different security.

It is a possibility that if you are having issues with transactional aspects whilst connected on a slow connection, that you may be hitting timeouts configured somewhere on their infrastructure.

The fact is that with the increasing ubiquity of broadband connections, the chances of developers not remembering the lowly narrowband user is becoming increasingly high.

[Capetonian]

In my case, and again using a dongle, with KLM, it loaded up the home page and from there when I tried to go to the 'booking' part it half loaded and then stuck. In order to see if the problem was with the website I called a friend who was a few miles from me but on an ADSL connection and asked him if he had the same problem, answer no.

I went somewhere where I could get onto a Wifi connection and it was fine, but as it was a public place I was nervous about using my credit card so was unable to finalise the booking.

[mixture]

Sounds like it might be to do with content compression.

Some websites will compress their content into a gzip stream, which your browser will then unzip on-the-fly.

Obviously if something happens to the compressed stream mid-flow, your browser will spit out corrupted output.

If you can make it there, I would suggest the website feedback form...

ba.com feedback survey - British Airways

[occasional]

By "does not work" I mean that it is not normally possible to complete a transaction using the website.

The precise symptoms are variable but the most common seems to be that the whole system seems to go into some sort of permanent loop. On other occasions I am told that that the host processor has apparently failed.

Given that the problem affects even the feedback form and the fact that the websites appear to be struggling whatever one tries to do, I am led to suspect the transmission system. Perhaps some incompatibility with the mobile phone protocol ?

[Booglebox]

Interesting. This is relevant to me because I often go to places where I use a very slow GPRS connection to get on the net.

I will mention this to the BA IT guys when I next see them

[occasional]

Booglebox,

You do not say whether you have had problems using BA.com in the past, but it would obviously be interesting to know whether there is a widespread problem with 2G connections.

[Booglebox]

Not personally, no, but someone using my laptop on GPRS at the aforementioned location has had problems accessing various BA websites.

I think it could be something to do with the high ping / latency of a cellular connection throwing all the posh AJAX / JS bits out... can anyone more qualified comment?

[occasional]

Thanks, guys.

It is perhaps worth emphasising that there are other secure websites with similar complexities to BA.com which work quite satisfactorily over the same connection, dropouts and everything else included.

This is what leads me to think that there is a technical problem somewhere.

I would certainly be inclined to wonder whether an airline booking website should be using "posh bits" at all.