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Does Windows Phone 7 Have a Data Transmission Bug?
blarkon writes "Microsoft commentator and Windows Phone 7 Expert Paul Thurrott has reported a serious bug that indicates Windows Phone 7 is uploading up to 50 MB of unidentified data every day. The phone operating system apparently ignores Wi-Fi connections for sending this data, leading some Windows Phone 7 owners hitting their 2 GB plan data limit while doing little more than checking email and social networking sites. Thurrott has written a book on Windows Phone 7 and is unlikely to be making such a claim unless it has some substance. At the moment no one knows what this data contains or where it is going, though Thurrott suspects it may be related to the Windows Phone Marketplace."
in some countries, ISPs do actually do this.
They used to do that. I remember when I was first looking at broadband a decade or so ago, it was typical for DSL providers to have a cap of 1 or 2 gigabytes per month included.
I think the only improvement I've seen to ISP performance here is that the cap doesn't exist. Of course without that they haven't been able to figure out how to provide the promised bandwidth.
All of the Winddows OS's have been sending "demographic" data back to Redmond on a regular basis for years. This was throughly documented on the old F**KMicrosoft.com website.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
There is a large difference between the available bandwidth a cable company has, and that of a cell company which transmits the majority of it's data wirelessly via satellites/cell towers.
Comcast can afford a 250GB limit, and probably much more. The same cannot be said for most, if not all, cell companies.
vos nescitis quicquam, nec cogitatis quia expedit nobis ut unus moriatur homo pro populo et non tota gens pereat.
imagine if you couldn't use your phone because the network was always full of other people's traffic? People would be irate if this happened (well, more so than on new year's eve for example).
There's a reason for cost-effective plans, and I'm sure the providers will increase the caps over time as they add more capacity, but until they give you more capacity than you need (not forgetting some people use it all, no matter how much you give them) then you'll have to put up with it.
They may also charge you excessive amounts for the extra usage, and that's a money-grabbing scam, but the fact that limits are there is not anything a sensible person should consider out of the ordinary.
Now, that your phone is sending 50Mb (fifty f***ing MB!) of data every day - that's shocking. That's truly shocking, how much xml crap does MS need to put in there? Have they forgotten that data is expensive and you can't treat as mobile phone like a desktop permanently connected to a Gb LAN? Software is so sloppy nowadays, I couldn't even think what 50MB of update/info data looks like.
I've had the Samsung Focus since mid-November. I use it heavily for email, browsing, and even the occasional Netflix stream of a TV show. I rarely enable WiFi. I just pulled up my usage on AT&T's website, and I'm averaging about 1GB/month.
Count me as a "No" datapoint in response to Paul Thurrott. Next question, please.
See also: international data roaming.
The World Wide Web is dying. Soon, we shall have only the Internet.
I believe some packet inspection is in order before we make claims like that.
Debug code that didn't get turned off or something. 30-50MB bulk uploads in a kinda-regular pattern, and when she turns on airplane mode it seems to save them up.
#2 suspect: somebody found a hole, it's been botted right out of the gate.
As always, all IMO. Insert "I think" everywhere grammatically possible.
Tell me about it, my unlimited plan used to be just that, unlimited. But now my provider (Vodafone) tries to sell extra packages and started sending letters when I hit just the 700Mb mark claiming 'fair use'... The new packages come as 'bandwidth' upgrades to the basic package, you'd better pay up those extra 10 euro miniumum otherwise when you do nothing you will suddenly get a bill of hundreds of euro's for the excess bandwidth... I calculated I would pay like 80x the money if I don't act, and 3x the money if I buy into the extortion scam.
They try to push the price-hike by whining with arguments that the network is flooded by smartphones from people that actually use bandwidth they pay for... But the stupidest part is that at the same time they advertise their new network packages with ads where people use their smartphone for all bandwidth intensive applications and claim 'Our network is ready for it'. Fuck them and their dirty tactics! When my subscription expires I'm so outta there, I'm willing to accept a lesser network just to make the point.
Some days I also wonder what Slashdot would be like without unsubstantiated claims.
imagine if you couldn't use your phone because the network was always full of other people's traffic?
Imagine people doing that because the phone company advertised that's what you could use it for.
There's a reason for cost-effective plans, and I'm sure the providers will increase the caps over time as they add more capacity...
Hahaha!
"I like to lick butts!" by MobileTatsu-NJG (#32700246) (Score:5, Informative)
If I remember correctly, the EU had put in a law to prevent this.
http://thenextweb.com/eu/2010/03/01/news-eu-law-place-prevent-shock-mobile-internet-phone-bills/
No idea whether it passed though.
this looks suspiciously like a routing issue.
The main complaint is data is going over provider wireless when WLAN is available.
If the first part of his forum he comments that it was a download from wap.cingular of 150MB which he feels should have gone through the WLAN.
He's right.. If this is the case they will have to break the network stack out into separate data providers with separate gateways and make sure every program has a priority list of which provider to use since likely there is data send and receive that HAS to go through the providers wireless.
I suspect if his download was from a network address outside cingular it would have used the WLAN.
Data limits are a scam. They are a tool for cell companies to suck as much money out of their customers as possible.
They are a reflection of the physical reality that you can only support so many people on a wireless network of any kind. You simply cannot (physically!) have everyone able to use the full bandwidth a phone is capable of, all the time.
You have a lot more of a point in relation to wired networks, but for wireless networks tiered pricing was inevitable once they started being used heavily. AT&T was the first to do so, because they have the cellular network that sees the highest data load.
"There is more worth loving than we have strength to love." - Brian Jay Stanley
those 5 guys that bought a Windows phone are gonna be pissed.
Apparently not. I don't hear any significant mass outcry against this, except from Geeks. I did see a lot of corporate drones spewing corporate propaganda about how the new rules would "keep the Internet neutral". Joe and Sally Sixpack aren't knowledgeable, or concerned enough, to care. Besides, you should know by now that the FCC isn't about protecting the American public from greedy corporations, its about helping those corporations maximize their profits beyond normal returns, after helping those corporations stealing control of what was a tax-payer funded and supported communication facility. The affect of bribing (a.k.a "Campaign Contributions") politicians in Washington was an "AT&T breakup" in reverse. Since FCC chairman are chosen from among ISP management and return to ISP management when their terms expire how could you expect a different result. The situation is the same in all of the regulatory bureaucracies, which is why our Republic has been replaced by a Cabal and the Constitution has been effectively gutted -- all in the name of "Security", of course.
I pay $72/mon for a 12Mb/s guaranteed no-cap connection. That does not include phone or TV. A friend of mine in France pays $30/m for a 40Mb/s connection which includes free calls 24/7/365 to any other phone in France PLUS 200 channels of TV. The difference is greed. I have a fiber optic cable buried in my front yard. It was put there 15 years ago by my city government after it got tired of trying to convince the local cable and telcos to bring highbandwidth to the city. The cable and telcos bribed Congress to outlaw such "unfair competition" and in that Bill Congress gave the cable and telcos $200 Billion to finish what the local governments had started. Unfortunately, the bill did not contain a performance penalty clause, so the cable and telcos pocketed the money and promptly forgot about the fiber optic plans. Now, they are trying to maximize their profits on old Copper wire by trying to "two-tier" packets. The FCC's new rule allows tiering for wireless but not for Copper. The reason is also obvious -- force cable users to wireless, where telcos can squeeze even more profits from users.
In the near future you can expect them to begin charging a monthly fee for each website you visit, along with a monthly data cap. Ten bucks per month for email, for Facebook, per RSS, 25 bucks for YouTube. All with monthly data caps that are so low it guarantees that the users will be pushed into expensive per Mb download charges.
Joe, Sally, by being so stupid you asked for it. Now you are going to get it. Unfortunately, so will the rest of us.
Running with Linux for over 20 years!
... until Verizon starts acting like a child and claims that 'unlimited' is not really what you and I understand it to mean...
I have absolutely no trust that the price hikes are in any relation to the total increased cost of the bandwidth. Network upgrades should have been figured into the subscription already, if they claim now it's not sufficient they either underestimated the rise in bandwidth use or just neglected to upgrade the network accordingly... Either way it looks bad for a company whose primary business is communication.
And do you really think the surcharge for overuse is based on any reality of economics besides greed? When you go over your 'pre-agreed' data limit and use some more it's suddenly gold being burned by 3G... To come back to your fast food analogy it would be like getting a single packet of ketchup with your $1,49 fries, and when you finish that and want more the next packet of ketchup will cost you $100.
http://lusfiber.net/
What you talkin' 'bout? My hometown was quite successful in doing exactly what you claim is now illegal. Are you sure that bill actually exists?
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
A few years ago I had a basic style flip phone. There were about six buttons on the face of the phone that would connect you to the internet and start racking up data charges with no confirmation. The start page was 500k of pictures and couldn't be changed. You also couldn't block data services from your account and instead had to pay something stupid like ten cents per kilobyte if you didn't have a data plan. So whenever you'd accidentally press a button, or the phone would press it as it was closing (yes, it would accept commands from these buttons if the phone was closed), you'd get about $50 in data fees assessed to your account.
Any attempt to demand that they remove them was met by stonewalling and flat out hanging up on you. I got out of my fees by threatening to take them to court over it, and suddenly they were able to block data services from my account. That didn't stop them from adding extraneous data fees a while later, though, when I had a smart phone with a real data plan. Imagine the shock when I see, "Data plan: $9.99. Data usage: $624.33" on my account because their service sucked so badly.
To be fair, I haven't had any trouble from them since then, and have never actually been forced to pay any of these fees since I threatened legal action..
Job? I don't have time to get a job! Who will sit around and bitch about being broke and unemployed then?
And there's a reason for that. Geeks understand the technology and know where these limits will inevitably lead. Most average people don't have the slightest clue yet. You can bet that when the companies start shaking down their users with a thousand dollar bandwidth bill because they showed a handful of YouTube videos at their holiday party, those average users will throw a fit, but by then it will be too late to fight it because the policies will be entrenched, and after all, nobody complained for the first two years, so the system must be okay. That's why it is our responsibility as geeks to pitch a fit at the top of our lungs and scream until Congress listens.
Check out my sci-fi/humor trilogy at PatriotsBooks.
Ours did for a long time, but slowly raised the caps until we now have unlimited almost in every package. Shouldn't this be the normal evolution, not the other way around?
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That is the one reason I wish I still lived in Lafayette (Of course I still own property there, gogo housing market crash). All in all, my time there was fairly well tainted by my employer so I don't really love the place, but the fiber to the home initiative was exciting and interesting. I'm sad that I didn't see it brought to completion. You may recall however that Cox sued to prevent it from happening using the law GP mentioned. Something in the way Lafayette went about it (perhaps using LUS as a front) allowed them to do it anyway.
I don't need a million points of light, just two points of multi-mode fiber and a 10 Gig-E router.
Wow, you drank a whole barrel of coolaid!
The fundamental limits are in the data RATE, not volume.A network provisioned for X Mbps will cost no less to operate if it isn't used at all and will cost no more if it is maxed 24/7. What we really need is for the ISPs to be forced into truth in advertising. They need to be forced to disclose how much bandwidth is actually provisioned per account (the committed rate).
Personally, I don't want the metering. I'm a bit tired of being nickeled and dimed to death by everyone and his dog. All the overhead for the metering billing and accounting for all this crap is eating a significant chunk of productivity in this country. It's a crazy amount of overhead (imagine that, bean counters count the marginal cost of absolutely EVERYTHING except for bean counting). What I want is a committed rate and the option to pay in advance for a higher committed rate. I want to know the cost up front and to not have to think about it any further. I've got more interesting things to do.
Cox sued... BellSouth sued... then several "concerned citizens completely and totally unconnected with Cox or BellSouth, we promise, honest!" sued, as well. I didn't recall them pointing to any specific law, though, just general angst over the whole thing...
The sad thing is I was working in the local government at the time and I know for a fact that the Fiber-to-Home initiative was only started AFTER the local government went to Cox and BellSouth and tried to work out a deal for either one of them to deliver fiber service. Only after they both laughed the government out of their offices did LUS pursue delivering it by itself.
And yeah, that's one of the things that makes me kick myself for leaving Lafayette as well. Especially since the neighborhood my apartment was in was picked as the first for fiber rollout about three months AFTER I left...
Maxim: People cannot follow directions.
Increases in truth directly with the length of time spent explaining them
Ah, but the femtocell packet inspection is actually a brilliant concept.
The femtocell sits on your normal network, and putting it on a hub makes all of its traffic open to in-house packet inspection. Even if all you got was IP addresses that would be a start.
It may be encrypting traffic it places on the network, but it seems unlikely it would encrypt standard packet structures.
Sig Battery depleted. Reverting to safe mode.