iPhone data pokey? Blame the Crackberry users!
Posted on 23 July 2009, at 7:30 pm, by Carly Z
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
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July 24th, 2009 at 7:58 am
“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.”
That report was from the Bell Labs “Department of the Obvious”. All of this “always on” stuff is choking the networks, and I can’t believe no one figured that was going to happen. The Pre is only going to make it worse.
July 24th, 2009 at 8:31 am
All of these micro-transactions – mobile email, twittering, and so on, might have a small data impact, but as jkj1962 says, the transaction impact is huge … and should have been pretty obvious.