Official: The smartphones that suck much more than others 3G networks are straining to support the demands of punters as their shiny new smartphones demand more and more information from the internet, says a report by British firm Arieso. iPhone 4S users use twice as much data as iPhone 4 users, and three times as much as iPhone 3G users. Arieso, a mobile network management software …
Of course, for that to be effective, we are going to need to enforce that cell phones are unlocked and truly portable to any carrier. We also need to have enough cell phone companies to make sure they can't collude. And we also need tight consumer controls for data - people should be notified if they (or their kids) will go over a preset limit.
It makes you aware of just how much data is flying around. It makes you angry that you can't easily tell in-app-adverts to piss off, ditto Motoblur syncing again when nothing has changed (there is Data Saver, but that kills rss updates). And it makes you realise that it isn't so bad to listen on a phone on the go to a 24kbit AAC stream because you'll get a nasty shock after a couple of hours of 192kbit mp3! I'm just glad there isn't also stuff like anti virus updates and the like going on too.
FWIW, referring to other posts, my ADSL is at the end of 4.4km of wire and it offers 2mbit/256kbit. I can stand in the field and my phone will deliver 2.4/1.8mbit.
Don't know about the UK, but here in the US virtually _every_ advertisement for smartphones emphasises the use of the device for streaming media (TV & movies) which requires huge bandwidth to accomplish. Streaming media = high data usage, period.
Add in the fact Siri is primarily a network-based application, relying on Apple's servers to do most of the "natural language" processing and you have another high-bandwidth user.
iPhone or Android or ?? does not matter -- it is the media apps and natural-language assistants which cause the consumption.
Net Neutrality means that packets from youtube.com are given the same priority as packets from yourprivateserver.yourdomain.com, not that you aren't penalised for raping the shit out of somebody's network or that some types of traffic aren't prioritised for QoS reasons. The idea is that you're paying for a pipe that you shove X amount of bits per second over and you shouldn't be double-charged for "premium access" to various sections of the Internet, or told by AT&T that you can pay them lots of money on top of your hosting bills and they'll make sure the packets from your server gets to their customers ahead of other servers.
Basically, proponents of net neutrality would like to pay for X amount of connectivity to the Internet and everything on it. Opponents of net neutrality would like to charge you separately for access to Skype, Youtube, Facebook, you get the idea.
Nowt to do with heavy users, but a good attempt to charge people multiple times for the same thing.
Correlation not Causation
Given that the majority of data app with the exception of Siri are iOS 5 not iPhone 4s specific you could equally theorize that
1) Heavy data users are the ones that upgrade the most
2) People use more data when their phone is new as they are playing with all the features
So let me get this straight--a product makes it so easy to access the internet that owners actually put it to use... and in Leach's opinion that means the product "sucks" and deserves to be "shamed"? Sounds like AT&T's whining circa 2008: "Of course our network is bogged down--we never expected that iPhone owners would actually *use* the internet features we advertised!" Uh huh.
I don't knwhere they are checking their data, but in my area you will never get to download a movie. Verizons 3G is slightly faster than dialup and their 4G is nonexistent. We call it a myth, kinda like bigfoot and the loch nest monster.Just go look up complaints for Verizions 4G and it will make you think twice about using it (if it even exist).
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This statistic only makes sense if there's a long tail of users that consume next-to-zero data (e.g. my wife on a grandfathered 6 GB iPhone plan and using between 0 and 2 MB per month). Perhaps 50% of the users consume 1% of the data. Then the "1%" is actually more like 10% to 15% of the "actual" users (as opposed to the money-for-nothing almost-inactive subscribers). Then the usage patterns come into a more rational ratio where these "1%" folks are actually consuming several (maybe ten, maybe even 20) times the "normal" usage pattern (excluding the next-to-zeroes). In other words, the headline is accurate but misleading.
Once upon a time, we were told that "UNLIMITED" dongle data means "Less Than 6GB", and that anything more than that was cause for account cancellation. The lying cheating telco eventually paid for about an acre of tropical paradise. Thank you Mr. Telco!
Figures we can use please. Throwing around information such as, "HTC Desire S users typically shifted out 3.23 times as much data as iPhone 3G users." means nothing if you don't know how much data an iPoop 3G user consumes (in this survey). Of course I'm taking this to mean that the figures aren't what you'd call high but saying "OMG IT'S THREE TIMES MORE THAN THE 3G!" is more sensational than saying it uses 300MB a month compared to 100MB. Remember that most UK networks think 500MB is more than enough for a modern smartphone over the month.
One other thing that seemed to me like pointless information was saying Nokia and BlackBerry users use less data than their counterparts. Nokia and BlackBerry phones don't come across as the most user friendly phones and haven't for quite a while. I don't know about BlackBerry but Nokia phones have been awful for a number of years now and I used to love their phones. It feels like saying a netbook owner won't watch as much HD video as someone with a mid-range laptop.
Its the mobile networks that promote these smartphones, they spend millions figuring out their complex offerings so that no one can figure out what they are being charged for. They are the ones who sell "unlimited" packages which they immediately limit as soon as someone actually uses the service.
Frankly I have no sympathy for these muppets and look forward to using my HTC Desire as much as possible. Except that 2 out of the 5 networks don't actually work in my local pub (i am in the middle of a city) for data and only 1 bar of voice. So when are they going to invest some of their vast profits in improving the network.
Web designer says (something like) "5% of internet usage is iPhone so you need (me to build you) an iPhone compatible website". What he doesn't say is that only a tiny % of that usage is looking at websites, it's email, apps, data syncing, music and video downloads...
"I was under the impression that iOS only syncs anything of a substantial size to the cloud (photos etc.) when you are connected to a wifi network? I thought it was only small things like contacts, calendars and notes that are synched over 3G."
With the new iTunes Match service you can have your whole music library in the cloud so (if you choose) you can download / stream music over 3G (or wifi).
It also have the facility to auto-download new music, apps, books etc. you purchase from the store to all your devices. Good features but if you enable it over 3G (off by default I believe) it could potentially use quite a bit of traffic.
The networks should stop offering 'unlimited' plans are they are not realistic - does your electricity company give you unlimited electricity for a fixed cost?
They should stamp down on the 1% of offenders who are increasing the cost / reducing the speed for the rest of us - it's hardly 'fair' 1% should consume 50% of the bandwidth and be subsidised by the 99% of other users.
...pays a hell of a lot more to generate a kilowatt-hour than it does to send bits flying around a wire. If the costs were as negligible as sending a megabyte of data, I'd call their actions reprehensible too.
People don't seem to realise this, and some masochists seem to actually welcome the idea of paying per unit of an infinite resource.
Fools.
...back when water was supplied by public-owned companies, you would pay "rates" based on the size of your house. A fixed monthly cost, because the cost to purify water is negligible and, from what I'm aware, it was actually illegal to charge for water. You could charge for purifying it and delivering it to your house via pipes, but not for the water itself. This law also stung restaurants who could not charge for a glass of water (although they could charge a nominal fee for the rent of the glass, etc).
I'd like anybody to try and tell me that the modern state of affairs is any better. Paying per cubic metre? All new houses fitted with water meters by law? Yeah, that one was sneaked through on the back of a hot Summer with hosepipe bans. People were convinced that it would be good to be a masochist and vote for price gouging, because it would prevent hosepipe bans in the future!
Except it, err, hasn't. At all.
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