Mobile Carriers Impose Handicaps On Smartphones

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."

Re:Wilfully drain batteries?

[fuzzyfuzzyfungus]

" Eleven carriers are found to impose a quite aggressive timeout value of less than 10 minutes for idle TCP connections, potentially frequently disrupting long-lived connections maintained by applications such as push-based email. The resulting extra radio activities on a mobile device could use more than 10% of battery per day compared to those under a more conservative timeout value (e.g., 30 minutes)"

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.

Re:Wilfully drain batteries?

[firex726]

Yea, they usually tout battery life as a selling point over the competition.
Plus if the battery goes dead, you cannot use up your data/minutes and get hit for overages.

Re:Wilfully drain batteries?

[drolli]

Every push mail client which will malfunction or only slowly function by this, or the battery consumption of which (see the android battery stats) will drive the customer to turn it off will motivate the customers to use text messages for urgent things.

If they manage to drive away 10% of the push mail users to sending 2SMS per day, they will already earn more on this than on the data transfer for the rest (lets not forget that in a flatrate they dont earn money on pushmail).

Re:Wilfully drain batteries?

[geekmux]

Why the hell would they do that?

Willfully slow the network down...on purpose? Why the hell would they do that?

Willfully charge extra for ring tones or ring-back tones? Why the hell would they do that?

It's the same answer all around...because they can.

Oh yeah, and because we let them, and prove it by bending over every month to pay the phone bill and saying, "Thank you, may I have another?" afterwards.