Now that I’ve gotten your attention with that blatantly sensationalist headline, here’s the real story. Researchers at Bell Labs have determined that the strain on mobile networks from email is actually worse than downloading and uploading large files. Apparently the constant polling of the servers by email (and location based programs, always on web programs, etc) is causing something akin to death by 1,000 papercuts.

According to Businessweek’s article:

Mobile email consumes around 69% of a wireless data network’s signalling resources, despite only accounting for around 4% of the volume of data carried by the network, he said.Web surfing, on the other hand, accounts for around 70% of wireless network data volume, but uses only around 12% of the signalling resources, Schabel said. He added that P2P applications—frequently thought of as resource-intensive—are in fact highly efficient.

So in fairness to Blackberry, they may have started the push email trend, but every phone is in on it these days. The Bell Labs conclusion also makes me cast a wicked side-eye at the carrier’s 5GB cap on broadband cards. Clearly capacity is not the major barrier to raising the caps. Hopefully carriers will start improving their capacity (and their broadband caps) soon!

Via Businessweek