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."
No names? (Score:5, Insightful)
How does this help me without naming names?
Re:OMG a telco screwing its customers (Score:4, Insightful)
Re:No names? (Score:4, Insightful)
TFA states "Due to security and privacy concerns, we anonymize their names and label them as Carrier A and Carrier B."
I'm guessing that's in fact BS, and the real reason they don't tell you which carrier is which is to protect themselves from massive lawsuits, or possibly because Microsoft Research can't offend the carriers because their corporate overlords want to have deals to sell Windows-based smartphones to them.
Re:Wilfully drain batteries? (Score:4, Insightful)
Apparently, the desire is not to drain the battery; but the telco is willing to do so in order to cut down on the number of TCP connections they need to deal with.
That is exactly right. The issue is, many carriers still have large NAT deployments. This means they must NAT every connection originating from every smart phone in their network. In the old days this wasn't a problem because the number of connections were typically fairly small and limited. Now that smart phones are general purpose computing devices, the number of connections which must be tracked have exploded. In other to more closely guard their finite resources, they lower their timeouts.
Of course, the proper solution is to migrate all smart phones to IPv6 and completely stop NATing. Its a win-win for everyone at that point.
Re:Wilfully drain batteries? (Score:5, Insightful)
I've seen 'tard mobile app developers keeping one, two or three continuously open connections back to a server for long poll. Then I ask them what if they get 10,000 or 100,000 simultaneous mobile users. Someone needs to beat them silly with a clue stick.
Re:This happens in Sweden too, and they don't lie. (Score:4, Insightful)
HA! Thank you.
This is precisely the sort of thing I've tried to argue about in the past and was repeatedly shouted down and told that I'm just an ignorant American and don't know anything.
The awesome connectivity and speeds has more to do with population concentrations than anything else. America's a huge place, and not a very old place, so our population centers are, er, not very centered or contiguous. New York City is huge, Philly is huge, and the Baltimore/DC metro area is huge, but there's about 2 hours of driving through nothing to get between them (and baltimore/DC are about 30 minute to an hour apart, depending on traffic). Travel a half hour east from any of those places and you're either in affluent suburbs, or straight-up rural areas, with farms, and cows.
A glance at a population density map is really all anyone needs to figure that out, but some people just don't get it. The cool thing to do is to consider anything Europe or Asia to be better than anything America, and that the sole reason for it is simply American incompetence. So frustrating. Impossible to actually ever discuss or improve anything when you're dealing with people like that, completely divorced from reality.
'course your landlines are faster, but that's also tied in to land area and population density.. and also WW2 actually. Infrastructure upgrade cycles! 'course we missed out on our last one! Fucking US Gov't gave the telecoms god knows how much money to lay fiber, to build modern high speed backbones across the country. Good luck finding where that money ever went to, that was coming up on 20 years ago now iirc..
Re:Wilfully drain batteries? (Score:4, Insightful)
Why do you have to pay the $50/month for 1GB on a "laptop" plan when your smartphone gets 5GB for $20?
That's pretty obvious. The average smartphone on a 5GB plan uses 0.2GB. The average laptop on a 1GB plan uses 1GB.