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Can Apps Really Damage a Cellular Network?
schnell writes "In FCC filings earlier this year, T-Mobile described how the behavior of one Android IM app nearly brought their cellular data network to a breakdown in one city. Even more interesting, the US carrier describes how just the 300,000 unlocked iPhones on their network caused massive spikes in data usage. T-Mobile is using these anecdotes as evidence that mobile carriers should be able to retain control over the applications and devices on their network to ensure quality of service for all users. Do they have a point?"
Clearly the most they can do is continually use up as much bandwidth as possible. If the networks aren't prepared for that, then that's their own fault.
I bet service providers would love to go back to the pre smartphone days where things were a lot less data intensive while charging smartphone era prices. Assholes.
Old Ma'Bell used the same argument decades ago when they were trying to force people to continue buying telephones directly from them because the phones were made specifically for THEIR network. It's all a load of crap. They just want control because control = profit.
And everyone can just move to another vendor that wants their money enough to be less of a d-bag about it.
The strong do what they can, while the weak suffer what they must.
data plans is biting you in the a** when it comes time to deliver, perhaps you should stop selling people unlimited or huge data plans... Arguing that not being able to control exactly how people use their data plan when you've advertised and sold them on the idea that they can do just about whatever they want seems sort of silly.
I'm not arguing that these phones/devices don't have the potential to cause huge problems, obviously they do, but you can't have your cake and eat it too.
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They have a point ....right on the top of their head.
Why then is T-Mobile having no problems in Germany, where they have exclusivity with the iPhone, but yet, apparently they're having problems here, with just a small number of iPhones?
Sounds hokey to me...
WARNING! This girl exceeds the MAXIMUM SAFE standards established by the FDA for BRATTINESS
Is that their networks are very poorly designed. As its costs a lot of capitol to build a network, and these companies are more worried about wall-street then their customers. Their networks are built on the cheap, and are way oversubscribed.
I'm guessing they're not able to use T-Mobile's 3G network but EDGE should work fine.
...they'd be viewing it as an opportunity for additional revenue. Set up multi-tiered data plans and charge the bandwidth hogs accordingly.
On the other hand, it seems fairly likely the issue is that their network can't handle the bandwidth they've already sold. In which case they just need to upgrade their network and quit whining.
Yes. I'm one of those 300,000. Edge only. While that is a lot of phones, I'm having a hard time believing they impact the network anywhere close to all of the 3G phones they have.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
Why would anyone use T-Mobile anyway? Verizon and Alltel are the only carriers worth considering. T-Mobile wants a network like Cleveland wants a football team.
Best Regards, David Geer
The problem with walled gardens is that the best plants always end up outside it. If service providers don't want applications and or devices on their network then they should not be allowed to advertise their service as internet service. They could use more accurate descriptive terms like cripplenet service. I suppose that should be shortened to cripnet.
Do they have a point?
No.
They have a shitty infrastructure.
My sig can beat up your sig.
About as much sense as me controlling how they spend my subscription fee, to ensure that all providers don't try to mess with their users.
Is that the only thing the first post should say is 'No'
I was thinking exactly what you said, as a Network Admin in yesteryear I can't imagine anyone who says 'the users broke my network by using it!'
Our network simple handle 'bad users' on its own. To much traffic was simply handled by throttling the user to a safe level when needed.
Seriously, how can you not have complete control over a network when its this size? I'd have to resign if I was in charge of their network and had to say 'some random user broke it, sorry boss'
You NEVER trust any part of your network to 'play' nice, even if its under your complete control ... you can make mistakes too. You just assume the end users aren't going to play nice, and go from there, most do bad things without even knowing they are bad so you just plan for it like you would in any other business process.
Persistent Volume manager for Kubernetes - https://github.com/dwimsey/openshift-pvmanager
The trouble is the smartphone, netbooks, what have you are not very useful at all without massive data plans. Without that they are just PDAs and those were never very popular with consumers. The issue here is the carriers need to upgrade the networks.
I don't what you can do with a smart phone if you are not able to use more than Gb or so transfer a month. You will use that up in just e-mail, web, downloading apps, and maybe some music these days. Lord help you if you want to use video or web radio. Most applications need to be able to do webservice calls and such.
Really you need to use lots of bytes to have anything like the experience they advertise. Even if they can control device useage to an extent well beyond what most consumers would regard as fair, I can't imagine it will help them. The only control that will is to price it out of reach of all but the least price sensitive customers again, and that is putting a genie back in a bottle; not an easy task.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
Except telecommunications networks collude on their d-baggery. It almost amounts to price fixing, at least in Australia. All the major telcos have data limits on their wireless and fixed services, and they all seem to have similar amounts at similar price points (except Telstra who provide little value and grow fat off their formerly government sponsored monopoly).
If a service cannot keep up with demand, then it is a failing of the company, not the fault of the users. They've oversold their network. More than trying to control what people can do, they should be regionally limiting subscriptions. Contracts help telcos plan for someone being otheir network for two years, and they should be able to plan their network growth and management accordingly.
Admit it. You post strawman arguments as AC so you get modded Insightful for refuting them, rather than Troll
T-Mobile just let me know not go to them for service, because their infrastructure is so weak and insecure that they fear IM apps. I want a phone service provider that knows how to build, manage, and run a reliable data network. T-Mobile does not appear to be that provider.
So the carriers in the US must have total control or their network is going to explode, eh? How is it that you can buy whatever device you want and connect it to whatever network you want here in Europe, eh? Why haven't the mobile networks in the EU exploded yet, then, eh?
9/11: Never forget it was a false-flag operation
do not constitute a reason for me to submit to having which applications I can and can't run decided by a third party.
Bandwidth should be managed on a user-by-user basis, not an application-by-application basis. If you have an application that sucks up all your bandwidth, then you shouldn't have anymore bandwidth to use. Carriers should advertise burst and long-term bandwidth rates and if you go above the long-term rate you should be subject to having your bandwidth capped at that rate.
No telling you which application you are allowed to run and which you aren't. No throttling based on port. If you're a customer, you are promised X bandwidth and no more. The carrier is allowed to deliver in excess of that if they so choose, but they aren't allowed to decide you use it for.
And the carrier should not be allowed to decide on a per-application basis whether or not you get to exceed the bandwidth cap. It must be based on a global, application agnostic bandwidth usage policy that chooses which customers get the extra bandwidth (if any) based on some algorithm that has nothing to do with what their traffic contains.
Need a Python, C++, Unix, Linux develop
Why not just give people freedom, and lock out the offending devices if a problem occurs?
I have a PDA and a netbook, both of them without wireless networking. (The PDA doesn't have a card and the netbook doesn't have working drivers for the wifi adapter). They aren't nearly as comparable as you claim. The netbook is less portable but more convenient to use for anything serious. The soft keyboard on the PDA is fine for typing small amounts of English (as in a few sentences), but drives me nuts when I want to type lots or anything in Spanish: the netbook is ideal for catching up on my backlog of translation work while waiting for a tram, or for driving an overhead projector; I even manage to do a bit of programming on it, although the screen size isn't really adequate for an IDE.
iPhone 4 is missing the 1700 frequency for the uplink, so it's a no go for T-Mobile 3G as well.
"why don't you just slip into something more comfortable...like a coma!"
The cake is a lie.
While EDGE is counted under the 3G banner, it's really not 3G at all.
EDGE is upgraded 2.5G (GSM/GPRS), speeds are not even close to basic HSPA.
There's a theoretical max of 473.6kbps for EDGE, 14mbps with HSPA. So the "traffic spikes" claimed by T-Mobile are laughable. If you're network can't handle 1/28th of it's capacity then there's something seriously wrong with it.
T-Mobile just introduced a data cap of 5GB per month. If they're offering 5GB, who cares how they use it? The network will give them the bandwidth available, and once they hit the cap they're done. You can't have your cake and eat it to, Tmo.
Wait, wait. Let me take a guess. T-Mobile gets a cut of the apps sold out of their own branded app store. Amirite?
or else!
Well not exactly. Technically, they lease the network from "we the people." You know the stuff they pay the FCC for? Yeah... that comes from us... sorta. It's like all public utilities though. They pay the government to have a protected "right of way" to install and operate their equipment. And as always PART of their agreement is not to abuse the public they are serving.
If I were a terrorist, I would be thrilled with the network provider putting all this effort into controlling individual applications and devices, rather than just making the network tolerant of abuse. Then, when all the sheeple are using crippled apps and devices, I can do massive damage to the network itself!
J'aime mieux les méchants que les imbéciles, parce qu'ils se reposent. -- Alexandre Dumas
Two of my imaginary friends reproduced once
Uhm, hell no.
In Mexico, we're stuck with overpriced, capped data plans. I went a whole year using less than 100mb a month. You just need to change your habits.
Youtube? Only use it on Wifi. duh.
Downloading/Upgrading apps and music? Same.
IM and Email? Sure, use it. Using moderate browsing, email and IM, I spend about 3MB per day of 3G data. Everywhere I go, there's an Access Point I can hop into, be it Starbucks, McDonalds, the school or at work (Even piggybacking from a wired laptop using NetworkManager's network sharing thingie).
I recently switched to a 500mb plan and use ~300mb per month.
Check out Unsealed: Whispers of Wisdom! http://unsealed.k3rnel.net It's an action-RPG about Open Sourcerers.
T-mobile should have a right to establish radio standards and congestion control protocols and require that any device on the network obeys these standards. They have no right to control end user applications as long as the operating system/radio firmware enforces these standards uniformly. In practical terms it means that apps with sustained high data rate or strict latency requirements may not work, or may stop working when network becomes congested. It's fine as long as "partner apps' also exhibit the same behavior.
The reason people want money is because they think money will give them power.
The reason they want power is that they don't have control over themselves.
No amount of money will bring you real power, just facades and illusions of power.
No amount of power, whether illusion or real, will bring you control.
No amount of control over other things, even if such a thing could possibly be anything other than an illusion, will bring you control over yourself. (Generally gets in the way, in fact.)
That's why rich people and powerful people never seem to be able to get enough.
That's why this story repeats itself every few years. No, much more often than that. Same story, different players, maybe a different market, etc. Details change, but it's always looking for whatever you want to call it in all the wrong places.
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Basic 3G is UMTS, 384kbps. EDGE can attain those speeds but typically, 200kbps is extremely good bandwidth and 100kbps is very good. 50kbps is not atypical. I've never gotten faster than 150kbps on EDGE.
On the other hand, I find that it is not at all difficult to get a full 384kps out of a UMTS device.
EDGE and GPRS seem much more affected by voice and messaging traffic than UMTS and HSPA are.
Both on the part of the people and of the companies.
Seriously, people in Japan just work around the government's attempts at restrictions. That's why they don't really understand the fundamental issues of freedom, such as self-determination. It looks to your novce manager like the ideal place to manage, until you try to get people to do something new or unusual. (Propaganda does work, but it also takes a while.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
Until the fix the underlying issue, which is bandwidth for the control functions. (The post just above in my browser mentions something about dynamic control channels.)
Computer memory is just fancy paper, CPUs just fancy pens with fancy erasers; the 'net is just a fancy backyard fence.
I actually did just read the article and contrary to what many people are posting about, this isn't about data usage and utilization, it's about connectivity utilization and overhead. It seems that similar to opening and closing a database connection there is some overhead in establishing a data connection on a cell phone which is seems is again similar to what happens when you send and SMS. It seems that smart phone development is similar to desktop development in that the application is rarely responsible for creating it's own network connection and instead relies on the OS to handle the network connection. If the phone OS is designed to create and destroy a new data connection for each request then how is that the applications problem. Also, how does a jailbroken iPhone handle data connections differently than a non jailbroken iPhone, the claims made in TFA are just absurd.
I recall reading somewhere that some European carriers use a different methodology that doesn't create such a bottleneck when these connections are opened and closed. So it seems that once again, the US cell carriers are trying to blame the users of their network for causing problems that would (could, and should) be fixed by upgrading the infrastructure. Cell providers make way too much money to complain about not being able to upgrade their networks.
Do what thou wilt shall be the whole of the Law - Aleister Crowley
If I can just surf on my slightly future smartphone to an html 5 website and watch videos all day long,
I am using a fair chunk of bandwidth I suppose. But I am just "using the web browser" from an app perspective.
i.e. I really don't see what control of particular apps has to do with control of bandwith usage etc.
Where are we going and why are we in a handbasket?
Generally it's not considered 3G. Here is a good visual representation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Mobile_telecommunications_standards
I work for an ISP and if we tried to institute any limits as to what you can connect to our network our customers would go crazy. This would be like your ISP saying, "You pay $80 a month for unlimited DSL service, but don't connect your PS3. PS3 uses a lot of bandwidth and brings down the network for everyone else." Sure we'd love it if all our users did nothing but text email all day and didn't use any bandwidth, but that's not real world. If T-Mobile has a problem with some app sending too much bandwidth, or too many packets they need to add some intelligent filtering to prevent that. Or add some logic to selectively disconnect phones that are inadvertently causing a DOS, instead of an outright ban.
Occasionally we'll have a rogue user who'll get a malware infection and send out a TON of packets and cause havoc. We just shut down that port until we can contact that customer and have them clean things up. We certainly don't (and wouldn't want to) limit what we allow customers to connect to the ethernet jack on the other end of our pipe.
Objective facts being used to make an argument, not an extrapolation from personal experience.
If you ignore ACs because they are anonymous - you're an idiot.
The issue with all Cellular networks (and any half duplex shared media) is that the time it takes to send 256 bytes over the air is not 1/4 the time it takes to send 64 bytes, it's more like .6 to .8 times. The signaling setup and tear down takes time to transmit packets over the air, which is fixed no matter the amount of bytes you send.
This impacts the network as the real bandwidth of a cellular network is not in BPS but airtime. If all the airtime is used up for signaling small packets for marginal signal customers, even the customers that have strong signals and want to send a http request will have to wait. Stateless protocols cause the worst problems as once a flow is established the PDSN/HA/etc does not have to do anymore work. With a app that generates a new flow for each data transfer of 10 bytes to say "hey im still online", the signaling bandwidth is used up and the network quickly falls to it's knees.
This massive use of third party apps and data is still quite new to the providers. This scares them, as you can't just turn on netflow, setup nfsen and see what's going on. Lucent is about the only company out there with a ntop like solution for the providers, but it's new and still being deployed.
I know the IP people are asking how they don't know what's on their network, but it's not just IP traffic you need to monitor, as all the carriers do so. monitoring the IP traffic only gives you the 10000 foot level view, to actually say how the loading on the radio layer relates to the applications in use is a very new requirement. While you can pull hundreds of data point for voice traffic from each radio and switch, at best you can find an error rate and total transfer for the busy hour on the data counters.
It's the providers problem for selling a data plan based on bytes transferred , rather than airtime used.
http://www.t-mobile.com/
"T-Mobile G2
Introducing 4G speeds on
T-Mobile's new network"
So we know unlocked iPhones are limited to running at Edge speed on the T-Mobile network cannot work in the faster 3G mode. But what does the word "iPhone" have to do with this anyway?
Aren't the people using "any" phone on the T-Mobile network, presumably, paying monthly to use that network?
By the same token, isn't it an advantage for T-Mobile that people are using unlocked iPhones at "only" Edge speeds? If those 300,000 users switched right now to using 3G (read "4G speeds") regular T-Mobile phones, wouldn't that cause more strain on the network and not the other way around?
It seems to me T-Mobile is getting the win with this situation. People pay and then also lock themselves into slow speed too! Just so they have an iPhone in their hand. If I was T-Mobile I would think they would encourage this.
I'm kind of surprised they have opened up the networks as much as they have. When you look at these things, the terms "Bailing Wire" and "Bubble Gum" come quickly to mind. The only thing that keeps them from exploding and killing everyone in the area is the fact that they are very rigorously tested for a very specific and limited set of inputs.
Most of the technology has roots in the long-gone past and it evolves slower (and costs more) than you can imagine.
Honestly, most large systems are like this. As they open them up for traffic they are having to re-engineer huge parts of their networks to handle untrusted data/signals.
Think of what Kevin Mitnick could do with a few sounds over a normal telephone line. These guys do NOT think about security or reliability until they are forced to--but then I do have to admit that they integrate what they learned, redesign and rebuild. They are good at remembering stuff and once they have failed they generally won't fail that way again. "Evolution" has served them pretty well so far, but it's going to be hard to defeat when people start getting more inroads into their equipment.
It seems to me that the point T-Mobile is actually making is that they need to upgrade their infrastructure to handle modern usage patterns, rather than degrade customer's modern usage patterns to conform to their obsolete data handling capacity.
The right answer is to advance, not to stall.
Yes. The point they have is that they need to harden their networks. There will always be cracked phones so they should not rely on control of the phones to protect them.
AT&T (the real one, not the present imposter) once used essentially the same argument against permitting "foreign" equipment to be plugged into their newtwork. Didn't work.
Warning: this article may contain humor, sarcasm, parody, and perhaps even irony. Read at your own risk.
Fascinating attempt at a story... If it contained anything substantial like a fact, I might actually believe it!
Of course, citing a single source from T-Mobile, which is obviously very unbiased, really lends a lot of credibility to the "story"!
"DENIAL"-How an optimist keeps from becoming a pessimist- \ \
Poor 3G, it was dead even before it was born.
music lover since 1969
do you know where the bottleneck was at ? backhaul ? servers ? airwaves ? interconnections ? was it a bandwidth issue (at which stage ?) or a processing issue (same question).
i can show you how to send an extremely fast server into a tailspin over a very fast connection, or a verly slow one... it's a variation on
10 goto 10
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
Hi, I'm a representative from your ISP and I noticed that you're not posting from an approved web browser. Also you have some applications on your computer that are not approved.
Due to these violations, we're going to be disconnecting your service.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
When I worked for Palm, a certain app that shipped on every Treo was written with a default schedule to hit the network every hour, starting at 8:00 am.
It wasn't a question of bandwidth, it was that some tens of thousands of devices, all synced to the same network time, opened data connections at the same time, overloading the server that was responsible for initiating data connections.
Should they have been using more than one server for that? Sure. Is it a valid reason for preventing certain apps from running on their net? Probably not.
Can apps take down the cell network? Yes.
If switching to another network were a matter of going into Android Settings and picking "Sprint", "Verizon", "AT&T", "US Cellular", "Metro PCS", or some other company from the dropdown, agreeing to their rate structure, validating your credit card, and ending your relationship with T-Mobile on the spot... you might have a point. Except, it's not. Regardless of whom you use for wireless service in America, you're chained to them by a relatively expensive phone that's a de-facto doorstop on the other carriers (with very, very few exceptions), plus beaten into passive acceptance by punishingly expensive early termination fees and lube up your ass all over again for the new company.
I don't think there's a single wireless carrier in *AMERICA* where you can use a gigahertz-class Android phone -- unlocked, unsubsidized, or otherwise -- without either being an existing customer or agreeing to a minimum 2-year contract. T-Mobile is at least nice enough to give you a $20/month discount if you bring your own phone, but NONE of them will let you casually establish service that includes 3G data speeds without at least an initial contract. The carriers do everything they can to make the market for wireless voice and data service as inelastic as they possibly can, and deserve no pity or compassion from the American public whatsoever.
the US can advertise an "unlimited" data plan, with a "1 GB monthly limit" written in a small font in some obscure place
See, the problem is that telco's are having issues with bandwidth and their jackass solution to the bandwidth issue is to put a cap on transfer.
Anyone else see why data caps are retarded yet?
Boot Windows, Linux, and ESX over the network for free.
Competition doesn't work when there are only a few players that all agree with each other on what to charge and what kind of service to deliver. This inevitably happens in any market after enough time, and even quicker when the barrier to entry is so high as it is in wireless telecommunications. And as others have said the EM spectrum is a public good, that should be administered by the government with the best interest of the public in mind. When a player is price gouging, or degrading service in the name of extra profits, it's time for new regulation.
If you build it, nerds will come. Soylentnews.org
That's a problem with infrastructure investment, not with the jailbroken iPhones. Your argument is flawed because you are explaining away a lack of infrastructure.
Sending a server into a tailspin has nothing to do with this. The standards are set by 3GPP, if the network can't deliver service while adhering to the standard it's not the customers' problem, it's the providers' problem.
(Modded this "redundant" by mistake-- I meant "insightful"-- so I'll kill off my mods here...)
Because your suggestion is clear and concise, I give it diddly-squat odds of being implemented by US carriers (unless they're tiny and trying to build a market for themselves). Like brokers of debt (i.e., banks), they want the rules to be as inconsistent and/or incomprehensible as possible, so that they can slap a fee on you just because they can.
"We are Microsoft. You shall be assimilated. Competition is futile."
The cellular network is designed and tariffed to be unreliable. So it can be taken down. That means some folks will end up going home instead of stopping off for some milk as the wife was going to ask if she could get through.
In major city downtown areas it is often impossible to get a cell channel. This isn't viewed as a problem either. Cell phones are unreliable and designed from the ground up to be that way.
Unfortunately, we are probably 10 years or less from having a complete collapse of the land-line phone network. It costs an incredible amount of money to maintain and that money simply isn't going to be coming from residential customers as they turn to cell-only. When the revenue base collapses, the landline infrastructure will simply be left to decay as something obsolete and unneeded.
I know people that believe in a power failure their cell phones will work just as well as landline phones do. They are quite wrong - most cell towers have little more than a PC-sized UPS backing them up. Unlike the landline CO with two days of battery power and a diesel generator.
So if it is possible to take down the network with ill-mannered applications and ill-mannered users, so what? The network is unavailable for some (probably short) period of time. It isn't like we are without phones, now is it? Except people don't seem to believe that cell phones are unreliable - even when standing in New York city at rush hour and being utterly unable to call out.
The mobile carrier can identify the model phone used and stop it if they don't like it. T-Mobile had informal support encouraging people to use the iPhone on their network indirectly by providing any support whatsoever. No help jailbreaking, but certainly giving out the APNs etc. needed to set up the phone.
They have the information to exert the control, this is just a grab to be able to have carte blanche to control all devices on their network. They have no proof that a similar number of alternate smart-phones these folks would have had if they were not iPhones would not have had the same effect. If I were the FCC I think my reply might be along the lines of "We have asked homeland security to look into your network practices if they can be so affected, as homeland security deems communications infrastructure to be of a national security interest. Please spead'em wide, err... cooperate with them in all details."
If you read between the lines what t-mob is asking for is permission to bar phones they didn't sell from their network, thus being able "to charge what the traffic will bear" from consumers. AT&T was broken up over this and the phones freed for purchase from outside sources amid similar dire warnings from Ma Bell over having Dictaphones/answering machines/the lovely Erica Phones (well maybe not the last) purchased privately connected to their phone lines. Get over it Carriers. We have prior incidents in court to set precedence. And if you want full control it comes with consequences for any failures falling in your lap as you risk losing common carrier status.
- Tjp
I am in wallow with my inner money grubbing capitalistic pig. ... Oink!
See that kills the best part of having a modern smartphone, in my opinion. I love knowing that if I'm within CDMA coverage in the US (which is most anywhere with any cell coverage, thanks Sprint for getting a good roaming deal with Verizon) I can pull my phone out and either send or receive not just audio but photos, video, or any other form of data. Yesterday I made a wideband "HD Voice" VoIP call not because I had any reason to (I have 450 minutes a month, I barely use 30) but because I wanted to see if it would work.
I would have no problem with caps if they were consistent with the normal uses that make smartphones interesting. The previous standard of 5GB caps should be the minimum, yet recently one company (AT&T) actually shrank their maximum down to 2GB. The web is getting more and more bandwidth intense and that's what we're getting sold smartphones as for. Web and multimedia apps, both need bandwidth limits to increase.
I used to get high on life, but I developed a tolerance. Now I need something stronger.
If you say it's ok for mobile carriers to restrict apps on cell phones, then you implicitly say it's ok for Comcast to dictate what you can have on your PC.
This is another reason why iOS and Apple's ridiculous idea that they can tell you what you can do with your property is a horrible precedent: it's my device, not yours.
In a real emergency, we would have all fled in terror, and you would not have been notified.
Can enough nodes in a network cause the network to become useless?
Of course. Just like you can DDOS any part of the network with a botnet to take it down. If enough nodes of a network behave in a way to overloads a part of the network, and that part turns out to be critical, then your network will be taken down.
It is silly to say this is purely a network provisioning problem, as the behavior of the nodes (i.e. the phones) cannot be foreseen, especially with new handsets coming out every quarter. And people's usage of their phones changes with time (e.g. SMS usage pattern). It is impractical for any network to cater for any possible mass usage scenario - i.e. if every phone in cell starts a call at exactly the same moment, the cell will be down.
This applies to landline also, if every phone in an area try to make a call at the same time, many will fail to go through.
If someone sells a landline phone that will phone home for updates at 12:00am on Sunday, after enough people bought the phone, the phone companies will find their network being hit by a BIG spike every Sunday, and eventually everyone in the area will find even their landline phone unusable at 12:00am Sunday. Does that mean poor planning by the phone companies?
Oliver.
Anywhere I go in Europe where there's a T-Mobile network, there's plenty of bandwidth, even in medieval fortresses. Why tempt US customers with HSPA+/HSPDA/4G then moan when they use it!
T-Mobile: If you build it they will come. Can't wait to get the Nokia N8 and suck up bandwidth everywhere.
T-Mobile, like the other telcos, will try to snow the FCC any way they can. If their network is misconfigured, underprovisioned, or just plain badly designed, lots of data traffic will buckle it. But they'll try to charge for it anway, then complain that people are digesting too much of what they paid good money for.
The reason that the iPhone isn't on Verizon today is the fact that Verizon *knows* that their EV.DO/EV.DOa network would go berserk- to the detriment of their existing customers. Once they move to LTE that's built-out to tolerable coverage, watch how fast the iPhone becomes available. The Android-based phones are newer, and get a cap on data today, unlike their older 'unlimited' contracts.
These guys aren't fools. They know who to lie to and bribe/lobby, and with what kind of BS.
---- Teach Peace. It's Cheaper Than War.
Perhaps you need some reading comprehension tutoring. I have never had an issue with it.
so DDOS attacks are the servers' fault ?
I'm wildly guessing, but I seem to remember, for example, the iPhone handling either wi-fi or 3g data keep-alive in a weird way, like not keeping connections alive but requesting orders of magnitude more connects/disconnects than other phones.
I'm certain there are perfectly standard-compliant ways to do something stupid or malevolent and overload one specific stage of a perfectly well configured and sized network.
The Cloud - because you don't care if your apps and data are up in the air.
There are plenty of independent retailers who will give you cash instead of a phone, if you ask politely.
T-Mobile even had some unofficial support for jail-broken iPhone users early on.
Is there anything better than clicking through Microsoft ads on Slashdot?
EDGE is not counted as 3G anywhere I've lived. Is it seriously considered that in the USA??
Ha, you primitive USians. Bow down in front of our superior socialist mobile market.
Even the donkeys in Portugal have higher speeds then you !
Here's a coverage map for one of our local operators in Finland.
I happen to live over 10km from the City of Tampere and still get 8Mbps download 800k upload of stable stream of data transfer. And soon we'll have a 4G / LTE network that'll able to give about 40 / 5 Mbps. Still slower than my 100MB fiber at home though...
www.tribalnetworks.org - helping tribal people around the world to own their own means of high-tech communications
Don't you find amusing how they perverted the meaning of "G" (meaning "generation")?
It's sort like saying "a 0.75 order of magnitude" or "we released our 2.4932154nd product".
All this proves is that the cellular networks have oversold their capacity, and have to resort to crippling their phones to keep the whole house of cards from collapsing.
Surely skype can do some damage to the cellular networks, at least profit wise...
Yes, but I have never had much luck getting usable Skype performance on an EDGE network.
EDGE is not counted as 3G anywhere I've lived. Is it seriously considered that in the USA??
No, but we do have a lot of people who like to think they know what they're talking about
CAn'T CompreHend SARcaSm?
And as others have said the EM spectrum is a public good, that should be administered by the government with the best interest of the public in mind.
Since when was the last time the government had the interest of the public in mind?
Mobile is using these anecdotes as evidence that mobile carriers should be able to retain control over the applications and devices on their network to ensure quality of service for all users. Do they have a point?
No. If they have a problem, they should fix their network. Hands off my goddamn pocket computer.
I see a disturbing trend here. T-Mobile has (since the release of the G1) been the friendliest carrier around, when it comes to data usage and so forth. They also were very supportive of customers wanting to use third-party Android firmware (like Cyanogen.) Now the G2 won't let you do that, and they're pulling Verizon-like BS stats to justify limiting their smartphones to crapware-laden pieces of crap.
If they keep it up, they'll lose my business. Granted, I don't like Sprint, and sure as hell don't want AT&T or Verizon. But you know what? A smartphone is not an essential requirement of life. Granted, there are a lot of young people who will disagree with me. I like having one, but if the price is to be jerked around on a chain by my provider, it's not worth it.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
I blame the marketing chimps. They naively assumed that GPRS and EDGE would be temporary stopgaps until "3G" swept the board. They didn't count on having to still be selling these services 10+ years down the line.
"Did you exchange a walk on part in the war for a lead role in a cage?"
Not as much as how in the Middle East, you can now buy MP5 players. Marketing people. Nobody ever said it better than Bill Hicks.
Aide-toi, le Ciel t'aidera - Jeanne D'Arc.
that I haven't either.
The higher the technology, the sharper that two-edged sword.
When I was a kid not only were there no cellular phones - you weren't even allowed to own your own wired phone in the US. You had to lease it from AT&T for a monthly fee because Alexander Graham Bell founded that company (sort of - read the prior link for the historic details), and he invented the telephone (this much is not in doubt). It's only recently that we're allowed in the US to bring our own phones to the wireless network, and they've pretty much handled that by making sure that each phone generally works with only one wireless network. We're pretty accustomed to being molested by our communications providers. Only a few years ago it was common to charge more than a dollar a minute to talk to your neighbor across the street if the street was one of the imaginary lines that separated Regional Bell Operating Companies. It was cheaper to call across the country, or even a foreign country, than to organize a meeting of the Parent-Teachers Association (PTA). Back then I bought Karma by subscribing to a cheap long-distance company and performing the contemporary version of bittorrent by serving as a "filebone hub" on an antique mail and data network called "FidoNet". It was like the Internet except in batch mode and we had parties called Get Togethers (GTs). Back then I was fiending for Internet because I had had it in the military, but couldn't get it because it wasn't available to the general public - only businesses, schools, folks who could afford CompuServ and so on. Get Togethers were a lot of fun because we got drunk, and sometimes naked, in person rather than over video chat. CUCME (see you, see me - an early video chat program) wasn't invented yet - it was the late '80's, or very early '90s. We still stayed anonymous in person mostly - everybody had a "handle" - which nym is taken from a completely irrelevant radio network (Citizen's Band) which will occur later. But I digress.
Anyway, there was this Georgia peanut farmer, whose name was Thomas Carter (not the former US President Jimmy Carter, as some (formerly including me) believe), who wanted to make phone calls from his tractor in the field. He was electronics savvy, so he rigged up a Citizen's Band radio that would allow him to dial the phone and talk on it, and this was the Carterfone and he sold copies of it, as any right-minded entrepeneur would. And of course AT&T shut him down because they didn't own this thing and so could prevent him from using it on their network. He sued, and it was many years later that his lawsuit resulted in the breakup of the US phone monopoly. That led to AT&T becoming at first just the vestigal long-distance portion of the former phone company, and later just a brand.
Non-Sequitur: The breakup also led to Unix - which was invented by Bell Labs (a division of AT&T at one point which invented not only Unix and C, but a great many other useful things), being divided into parts. The Unix name was sold to The Open Group, which certifies Unix to this day. The Unix source code and OS was sold first to Novell, which sold it to a quite respectable Linux .com called the Santa Cruz Operation, which burned through their .com millions and sold it off to a spinoff of Novell called the Canopy Group. Actually, they sold it to a spinoff of the spinoff. This story goes on for a long time, and is slowly grinding to an end documented here. Unix was the coolest thing that AT&T ever did, and I wanted to work that in even though the code is now owned by a gang of bastards who are determined to ruin every last bit of its utility. But I digress again. Forgive me, it's late.
AT&T's motto was: "We don't have to care. We're the PHONE COMPANY." The company that owns the AT&T brand now has nothing to
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3.999~G = 4G :)
Why would you think that?
If you have several EDGE handsets support multi-slot uplink, you are killing the link budget for that particular node. UMTS has far more capacity in terms of channels and upload download slots. As such, many more users in the same amount of spectrum.
Speed is not the reason carriers went to UMTS.
If that is the case then the provider needs to upgrade their infrastructure. I work at an ISP, we have similar problems from time to time. The way to react is to upgrade your stuff and if usage patterns change too much _charge the customer more for what they use_.
Running crying to the government is a thinly-veiled ruse to get them to approve selective disadvantages to establish a protection racket. Net Neutrality, anyone?
no no no. Its none of these things. It all to do with uplink and downlink slots. There are only so many slots per channel and only so many channels. THe more people downloading, the more slots they take per channel. That means the less people can fit on one channel but on a different time slot. This is especially true for EDGE class 10 and up since you can use 5 slots.
Thank you! That template used to be a side bar on all of the Wikipedia articles about mobile telecoms standards, but some idiot removed it about a year ago and I've not seen it since.
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Seriously, what he hell are you talking about?
If your battery went dead, your handset would not perform a detach. The network would assume you are still connect but went into a building or something and would save your slot. For a set amount of time. I dont feel like looking into the core spec to see what that is, but we do test for that sort of thing when the phone goes through PTCRB or GCF certification.
In fact, EVERY SINGLE phone sold in the US has gone though PTCRB certification. There are literally thousands of protocol and rf layer test cases covering GSM/GPRS/EDGE and UMTS.
Nearly all test cases are CAT A, so you MUST pass them.
If an application has access to the stack, it certainly has the power to bring down tower. THIS IS WHY WE TEST PHONES!
Even worse. Edge helps very little with signalling throughput.
The general problem with mobile network is deeply rooted and independent of the actual radio tech. It is the problem of deterministic thinking - everything has to be defined, nailed down hard and "guaranteed". That is all nice however it also creates a system that tends to fall over completely once its loading is past a certain level - a phenomenon known as congestion collapse.
For example in GSM, GPRS (w/wo Edge) the signalling is nailed down hard to one slot out of 8 in a cell (there is a way to couple two cells to have 1 slot out of 16 data/voice slots). That is it. If you load that to the max so nobody can talk all the mobiles covered in the cell start retrying and it only gets worse from there onwards. 3G is no different. Specific coding combinations (3G logical channels) are reserved for signalling with little or no ability to increase the capacity. In both cases the signalling logical channels are used for nearly everyting - handover, data attach/detach, voice call setup, etc.
To add insult to injury the signalling capacity upstream in the network is also limited. In GSM it is usually fixed capacity TDM channel. In 3G it is quite often also limited by processing capacity in the RNC. That one is also a classic example of mobile/telco thinking.
Someone, in his infinite wisdom, has put the MAC layer (yes, the actual MAC) not in the radio access in 3G but all the way back in the RNC. This would have been the equivalent of ripping most of the Ethernet stack in an Ethernet network consisiting of hundreds of switches and moving it to let's say the company firewall. Terminally dumb design (TM). The terminal dumbness is further exasperated by implementing the RNC "the embedded realtime way". Instead of doing most of the signalling purely in software off a shared state in a shared database which can scale to millions of handsets most RNCs do it in specialised modules with local databases which cannot be scaled up because this is the way telco switch is supposed to look like according to indoctrinated developers. As a result a 3G RNC hits the signalling buffers in no time. All it takes is enough apps like the Android app in question or even having enough plain old iPhones as ATT learned the hard way. If for example it was implemented predominantly in software instead, all it would took to increase capacity would have been throwing a couple more nodes into the compute cluster.
Overall, it is "nothing unexpected, told ya so". I have tried arguing this with "great architects" and "great developers" in one of my past jobs. Pointless excercise. This will happen again, again and again until the main vendors eat their deterministic realtime humble pie and switch to a more probabilistic control and scalability for the architecture. That however is least likely to be forthcoming. In fact, in some areas 3GPP in their infinite wisdom has prohibited that at a standard level.
Baker's Law: Misery no longer loves company. Nowadays it insists on it
http://www.sigsegv.cx/
The trouble is the smartphone, netbooks, what have you are not very useful at all without massive data plans. Without that they are just PDAs and those were never very popular with consumers.
Netbooks are full computers, their e-mail clients can work offline, and a good web browser that supports Atom feeds and Read It Later can also work offline. Apple markets iPod touch, the version of iPhone without a GSM radio, as a media player and a video game player; it's more powerful than a PSP.
This equates to me boasting that I could win a hot dog eating contest and then requesting that the contest be limitted to one hot dog.
The analogy isn't perfect. There is room for both hot dog eating contests judged by quantity and hot dog eating contests judged by speed over a fixed number of servings, just as there is room for both marathon and sprint footraces in the sport of track and field.
No, they do not have a point.
Anybody on Slashdot knows that the Internet is little more than a bunch of smaller networks connected into an, ahem, world wide web. "The Internet" doesn't know what an individual network much less person is going to do, and yet it is incredibly resilient. Even when worms are criss-crossing the global at light speed, infecting millions and millions of machines, the vast majority of websites are still perfectly acceptable to the vast majority of users. This is, quite obviously, not achieved by pre-screening what people or programs may use the Internet.
The real problem is that, as they did with wired Internet access, the phone companies want to have it both ways. They want to tell you that you can buy an unlimited data plan but start to get uppity if anybody actually uses it. They want you to care about every bit you send if you're an "abusive user" who needs to cut back their usage and yet convince you to up-buy onto an "unlimited" plan if you're one of the people who will never in their damn lives get close to needing it.
If their networks can be brought down so easily by rogue applications, then in addition to the usage problem they're scrambling about they have a major security problem that they need to fix with much greater urgency. iPhones spiked your data usage? Poor things. That's one of the reasons people buy a damn iPhone, because of all the things it can do for that over and above being a phone -- and whether they like it or not, in this day and age that mostly means something on the Internet.
Now, I don't mind overselling in principle and I'm not saying every single thing has to be allowed.
has no place on any platform. I simply do not trust the phone companies to be in charge of determining it. Apple's running of the App Store should be enough to strike fear into anybody who believes a company should be allowed to decide everything for itself. Like child predators or terrorism in politics, "protecting the network" will be their rallying cry as they throw anything that hurts their bottom line off. I'm not willing to go there.
It seems to me that they are either really over thinking this problem or trying specifically to use it (in lieu of an actual fix) to justify a controversial action that they want to take anyway (net neutrality). Simply throttle the users! Why go all the way down the application layer when you can just say "hey, these users are using an unusually excessive amount of network traffic, we'll just slow their u/d speeds a bit. And if their network can't handle some simple excessive polling from a chat program (formatted text!) how in the world can they handle youtube traffic?
They own the network
Actually, they don't. A network consists of a number of endpoints and a number of interconnects. Most of the endpoints in a cellular network are client devices. They don't own these. The interconnects, in the case of a wireless network, are spectrum allocations. They don't own these, they rent them from the people (mediated by the government, in the form of the FCC in the USA), on the condition that they will use the spectrum in a way that benefits society (although some of this benefit comes from handing over a large pile of money to be allowed to use it). They do own a lot of the towers, although they rent a lot of the others.
My point is that their ownership rights are only truly applicable at the places where the bridging point where the mobile devices connect to the wired infrastructure. Beyond that, they have certain tenancy rights to the airspace - they can restrict what transmits within that spectrum, but only within the rules laid down by the FCC and only until their license for that spectrum is renewed. They have no rights at all on the client, any more your ISP has rights on your computer.
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All the US cell companies need to focus on building adequate infrastructure instead of continually trying to oversell something they can't actually provide.
Actually, if it was going to go berserk in the example you gave, it'd have already done so. All those Droid, DroidX, Droid Incredible, and Droid2's would have done it just as readily as the iPhones would have.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
It's because those "great architects" and "great developers" are inured in the telecom industry insanity. (And it's that...) All these protocols are based on the premise that absolutely everything must be controlled by them- and that it be some variation on the theme of SS7. Seriously.
I am not merely a "consumer" or a "taxpayer". I am a Citizen of the State of Texas
ever try to use skype from your 3G phone to make a 911 call while being chased for your life?
funny: it's sure easy to do with a $50 unlocked Nokia POS phone.
sometimes there's more to a service than one single feature.
I noted that they decline to say which application did their network in. Considering T-Mobile's motives in this discussion, while I find their story believable I think it's pretty poor reporting calling an anecdote news.
Many cell service providers are offering USB internet sticks that run off their data networks, and many have cell phone tethering options too. With the exception of phone calls, an ordinary computer can hit the cell network with far more data traffic and connections than the cell phone can. There is nothing the companies can do to mandate what's installed and running on your computer, like P2P programs, VOIP, video chats, etc.
Given this, why the hell are they so concerned about apps on a phone "damaging" the cell network?
But that doesn't mean that some packets aren't more important than others.
My LAN network is designed in the way that LAN networks should be; it's fast enough that it's never the bottleneck, the gigabit switch is very fast and rather expensive.
But the WAN links cannot be provisioned to that level, maybe someday for wired networks, but NEVER for wireless because it's a broadcast medium. So every packet heading for my ADSL line has a TOS/DiffServ value branded on it. Each known TOS value gets put into one of several priority queues (the rest are treated as bulk) each queue has a peak allowed bandwidth. ie. If something tries to flood the 'max-override' queue they get 'max override' packets but only a few percent of the available bandwidth. The result is that even when the link is being flooded with email connections (or other PtP style connections) the "remote desktop" connections still work perfectly.
The important thing here is control, the 'user' has the choice of which queue any packet goes into, the network delivers the packet depending on that choice, not port numbers nor IP addresses nor any other sort of 'inspection'. If the user sends everything out as 'max override' that's what they get, 15kbit/s of top priority data. OTOH the worst case of 'bulk' data might be just 10kbit/s but normally it'll be several Mb/s just like now. (Of course it should be round-robin'd between "users" not "connections" like it is now.)
The 3G networks are designed with just this sort of traffic sorting, the designers knew what they were doing ... some of the operators, not so much. (at least that's what they would have us believe!)
Ars has a backgrounder on it that Slashdot posted in their 40th anniversary of the Carterfone decision article.
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