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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.
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.
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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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...
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...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.
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Do they have a point?
No.
They have a shitty infrastructure.
My sig can beat up your sig.
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.
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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.
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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?
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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.
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Why not just give people freedom, and lock out the offending devices if a problem occurs?
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.
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.
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.
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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.
So T-Mobile is saying that they need to be able to have complete control over which apps can be run on devices on their network.They are asking us to accept their absolute control over what we do with our wireless devices.
Let me ask you all this: Has T-Mobile (or any of the other carriers for that matter) earned the benefit of the doubt to the point that we, as consumers, should trust them with this absolute control? They are claiming that unlocked phones or Droid apps are going to "damage their network". Given their history, is there any reason we should believe them?
I've noticed that it's possible to hook all sorts of devices to the Internet, which somehow keeps working. We haven't had to resort to "AT&T-approved operating systems, or browsers, or computers" in order to "protect" the Internet (which I'm sure the broadband providers look at as "their network").
It seems that we need a level of regulation and reform regarding the Internet and wireless networks that goes beyond simple "Net Neutrality". Maybe we should put the burden of proof on the providers to show why connection to the Internet should not be a regulated public utility.
I think stories like this make it pretty clear what the Internet is going to look like if Net Neutrality laws are not enacted.
You are welcome on my lawn.
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.
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
Generally it's not considered 3G. Here is a good visual representation: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Template:Mobile_telecommunications_standards
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.
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.
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."
they have no issue with you using your 5GB of transfer a month. what they have issue with is that they can't include the extra ~0.3GB in control protocol overhead in your bill.
also: when you try to issue 1GB in control messages a month, and only use 1GB in bandwidth with that 1GB in control. you can't charge for bits that needed to get transfered due to their network errors, or for the ICMP keep-alives the towers send to the phones. they're complaining that they can't charge for the control: because newer open devices are capable of more then they had planned for in overhead.
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.
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.
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.
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.
EDGE is not counted as 3G anywhere I've lived. Is it seriously considered that in the USA??
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.
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
Help stamp out iliturcy.
This is a stupid as is was back in the dialup days. I remember being with an ISP at our office, where they put a cap on the amount of time you could stay connected. So I had a script on our NAT box that would redial after 30 seconds when the line was dropped. Always-on Internet, just with a 30 second dropout very 6 hours. How they thought those 30 seconds would help with their bandwidth issues I never knew.
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.
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!
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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