Mobile Carriers Impose Handicaps On Smartphones 174
Nrbelex writes "A team at the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research has uncovered, for the first time, the frequently suboptimal network practices of more than 100 cellular carriers. By recruiting almost 400 volunteers to run an app on their phones that probes a carrier's networks, the team discovered, for example, that one of the four major U.S. carriers is slowing its network performance by up to 50 percent (PDF). They also found carrier policies that drained users' phone batteries at an accelerated rate, and security vulnerabilities that could leave devices open to complete takeover by hackers."
This happens in Sweden too, and they don't lie... (Score:5, Informative)
...about it either.
I moved out on the countryside, thinking that Sweden was one of the most developed & connected countries in the world, well...turns out it's something of a fad.
Tried 3 different operators, Telenor, 3-Sweden and Comviq (essentially Tele2 on the cheap), Turns out that Telenor shares Cellphone-Relay point (antenna) with 3-Sweden, and Comviq has their own (again, owned by Tele2)...getting confusing yet?
The thing is, I tried all of these without any good results, oh...the signal was at FULL capacity...full power (all 4 bars lit), but the oh-so-known 404 Error turned up every 2nd web page or so, sometimes I had to wait 10 minutes for the 6mbit connection to load one single web page.
Then I got savy and tried a trick like "Kick-the-other-users-off-the-carrier"...how does that work, you ask? Simple...just disconnect to the network (3G!) and connect again. This logs you on at full speed, well...people found out about this and a storm of complaint came on, denied by all the telecompanies...of course.
And then I called support, and they finally called back and told me - twice (two different technicians calling each time) - that your cellphone carrier is OVERLOADED.
Then I asked them, well...will you expand this capacity since it's as you say ...overloaded? The answer was NO. From BOTH of them.
The town of 13.000 people is too small to add another 1 Mill SEK (Swedish currency) cellphone antenna relay carrier...so we won't do that.
BUMMER.
Turns out they solved this by simply "sharing" the speed amongst the users, by limiting it. Not admitting this of course...but the results amongst our neighbors and me tells it's own story.
Needless to say, I switched to LandLine based internet, good ol'l ADSL (or VDSL...as it's called now) and the speed blazes off a steady 13-14 Mbit without as much as a hickup. Despite this, the door-to-door sellers, claim that we all should DITCH the old wired connection because the new wireless one is MUCH BETTER and MUCH CHEAPER...
Yeah ...riiight...we've experienced that... O__O
Furthermore people are actually dumb enough to fall for it, and the masterplan from all the telecompanies is to DITCH the LANDLINES because ...in their own words...are too expensive to maintain.
Goodbye reliable internet...People...please start protesting against this in YOUR neighborhood!
Re:Wilfully drain batteries? (Score:5, Informative)
Another issue is that a lot of developers are writing mobile applications the same way they might for a desktop computer in an office with a significantly more reliable Internet connection. They aren't considering the reality that a connection may be intermittent, or drop off unexpectedly, and the effort the phone goes through to re-establish that connection.
Re:Wilfully drain batteries? (Score:4, Informative)
My telco uses NAT, idle connection still takes resources from the connection tracker.
Re:Wilfully drain batteries? (Score:4, Informative)
I was involved in building a mobile operator network.
It's typical for operators to run stateful TCP proxies to overcome the bandwidth-delay problem with TCP/IP. Without these proxies a lot of TCP/IP stacks have very poor performance. As far as I remember, we used 20 mins. timeout to conserve translation slots (which were limited by hardware).
Second, a lot of providers do NAT. Which should be self-explanatory.
Re:Wilfully drain batteries? (Score:5, Informative)
Well, ActiveSync (exchange push) is one good use of these idle TCP connections. The thing though is that idle TCP connections use absolutely no bandwidth. ActiveSync will open an HTTP TCP connection and ping every now and then, increasing the time between pings to find out how long the network supports idle connections. Once it stops receiving replies to the pings, it tears down that connection, opens a new one, and keeps the ping interval at the last known successful time. If there's no actual data being processed (new emails being sent/received, calendar entries, etc) then no traffic other than the pings will be passed, and these are small packets. The goal being to find the longest time possible that the connection can stay open between having to send pings, as any data uses bandwidth, battery, etc. Once ActiveSync
Setting up a TCP connection takes way more bandwidth and battery than leaving an idle connection open. And having to keep doing it, over and over, if the network operator is killing idle TCP connections, will drain a battery extremely quickly, and generate way more network traffic in the long run.
So why do carriers do it? Shitty NAT implementations. Up here in Canada Rogers, until recently, used NAT and the 10.x.x.x block for all wireless data users. Their NAT router would kill idle connections quickly to keep overload ports available for all it's customers. At one point it got so bad that the battery on my iphone 3G was draining in 2 hours tops if I kept push on for my exchange server.
Re:Wilfully drain batteries? (Score:5, Informative)
It depends on the plan and provider, but you're absolutely right. It's what differentiates a featurephone "social networking" plan from a "blackberry data plan" from a "smartphone data plan" and a "laptop/vpn plan".
After all, if a "social networking" plan gets you on facebook, why not pay $5/month for that and tether your PC to it? Why do you have to pay the $50/month for 1GB on a "laptop" plan when your smartphone gets 5GB for $20?
It's all in the differentiation of services - the mobile network LOOKS like IP, but it isn't. Using proxies, firewalls, NAT, NATx2, etc.
If you want the freest possible Internet connectoin, you've gotta pay for it (the "VPN" tier should get you a real exposed IP, while the "laptop" tier gets you NAT+firewall typically, etc).
Someone needs to do a comprehensive study of all the tiers available and what they provide - are they NATed (and how many times)? Firewalled? Proxied (transparent or not) (transparent proxies are extremely common on smartphones - small screens don't need full-res images)? etc. What ports allow traffic (80, 443 only are common and most users won't notice).
Comment removed (Score:3, Informative)
Wikileaks (Score:4, Informative)
How to submit a leak to Wikileaks [wikihow.com]