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Mobile Carriers Impose Handicaps On Smartphones
Nrbelex writes "A team at the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research has uncovered, for the first time, the frequently suboptimal network practices of more than 100 cellular carriers. By recruiting almost 400 volunteers to run an app on their phones that probes a carrier's networks, the team discovered, for example, that one of the four major U.S. carriers is slowing its network performance by up to 50 percent (PDF). They also found carrier policies that drained users' phone batteries at an accelerated rate, and security vulnerabilities that could leave devices open to complete takeover by hackers."
What is the world coming to!
Why the hell would they do that?
How does this help me without naming names?
...about it either.
I moved out on the countryside, thinking that Sweden was one of the most developed & connected countries in the world, well...turns out it's something of a fad.
Tried 3 different operators, Telenor, 3-Sweden and Comviq (essentially Tele2 on the cheap), Turns out that Telenor shares Cellphone-Relay point (antenna) with 3-Sweden, and Comviq has their own (again, owned by Tele2)...getting confusing yet?
The thing is, I tried all of these without any good results, oh...the signal was at FULL capacity...full power (all 4 bars lit), but the oh-so-known 404 Error turned up every 2nd web page or so, sometimes I had to wait 10 minutes for the 6mbit connection to load one single web page.
Then I got savy and tried a trick like "Kick-the-other-users-off-the-carrier"...how does that work, you ask? Simple...just disconnect to the network (3G!) and connect again. This logs you on at full speed, well...people found out about this and a storm of complaint came on, denied by all the telecompanies...of course.
And then I called support, and they finally called back and told me - twice (two different technicians calling each time) - that your cellphone carrier is OVERLOADED.
Then I asked them, well...will you expand this capacity since it's as you say ...overloaded? The answer was NO. From BOTH of them.
The town of 13.000 people is too small to add another 1 Mill SEK (Swedish currency) cellphone antenna relay carrier...so we won't do that.
BUMMER.
Turns out they solved this by simply "sharing" the speed amongst the users, by limiting it. Not admitting this of course...but the results amongst our neighbors and me tells it's own story.
Needless to say, I switched to LandLine based internet, good ol'l ADSL (or VDSL...as it's called now) and the speed blazes off a steady 13-14 Mbit without as much as a hickup. Despite this, the door-to-door sellers, claim that we all should DITCH the old wired connection because the new wireless one is MUCH BETTER and MUCH CHEAPER...
Yeah ...riiight...we've experienced that... O__O
Furthermore people are actually dumb enough to fall for it, and the masterplan from all the telecompanies is to DITCH the LANDLINES because ...in their own words...are too expensive to maintain.
Goodbye reliable internet...People...please start protesting against this in YOUR neighborhood!
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
"...the team discovered, for example, that one of the four major U.S. carriers is slowing its network performance by up to 50 percent (PDF). They also found carrier policies that drained users' phone batteries at an accelerated rate, and security vulnerabilities that could leave devices open to complete takeover by hackers."
Uh, a team "discovered" this?
Telcos are screwing with us and not delivering what they advertise. Yeah, wake me up when there's actual news to report instead of wasting time and money proving the painfully obvious.
Oh, and where the hell are these "more than 100" carriers?!? I think I can name five off the top of my head. I thought the giants pretty much bought everyone else.
This must be the kind of app that the carriers meant when they said that it would be a problem if they allowed "Unauthorized Applications" on the network. See, they were right all along.
I dont care about any of that, all I want to know is I can still access my facebook and tweet about it while I am updating my friends list?
Ha, exactly. And now you know the reason that telcos get away with this kind of bullshit, because to be quite honest, this is all that 98% of their customer base cares about too.
Soon to be AT&T, Verizon and Sprint.
And after that AT&T and Verizon.
And after that AT&T.
Resistance is futile.
I don't always use unix-like operating systems; but when I do, I prefer FreeBSD.
HA! Thank you.
This is precisely the sort of thing I've tried to argue about in the past and was repeatedly shouted down and told that I'm just an ignorant American and don't know anything.
The awesome connectivity and speeds has more to do with population concentrations than anything else. America's a huge place, and not a very old place, so our population centers are, er, not very centered or contiguous. New York City is huge, Philly is huge, and the Baltimore/DC metro area is huge, but there's about 2 hours of driving through nothing to get between them (and baltimore/DC are about 30 minute to an hour apart, depending on traffic). Travel a half hour east from any of those places and you're either in affluent suburbs, or straight-up rural areas, with farms, and cows.
A glance at a population density map is really all anyone needs to figure that out, but some people just don't get it. The cool thing to do is to consider anything Europe or Asia to be better than anything America, and that the sole reason for it is simply American incompetence. So frustrating. Impossible to actually ever discuss or improve anything when you're dealing with people like that, completely divorced from reality.
'course your landlines are faster, but that's also tied in to land area and population density.. and also WW2 actually. Infrastructure upgrade cycles! 'course we missed out on our last one! Fucking US Gov't gave the telecoms god knows how much money to lay fiber, to build modern high speed backbones across the country. Good luck finding where that money ever went to, that was coming up on 20 years ago now iirc..
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
They're just shutting down the connection and forcing the phone to re-establish it. Annoying, but I doubt it's illegal since every firewall and NAT box on the net has the same timeout mechanisms...they're just set for longer delays.
TFA states "Due to security and privacy concerns, we anonymize their names and label them as Carrier A and Carrier B."
I'm guessing that's in fact BS, and the real reason they don't tell you which carrier is which is to protect themselves from massive lawsuits, or possibly because Microsoft Research can't offend the carriers because their corporate overlords want to have deals to sell Windows-based smartphones to them.
Yes, it is for security reasons - the researcher's own security.
They are clearly afraid of those behind the names.
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
Prohibit any carrier - wireless or not - from advertising "Internet" unless they mean pure, unfiltered, unadulterated Internet.
Let them advertise and sell "AT&T Data Access to the parts of the Intertubes we think you'll like at a speed we think you'll pay for" if they want to, just don't let them call it "the Internet."
Knowledge is how to play a game, intelligence is how to win, wisdom is knowing what game to play.
How to submit a leak to Wikileaks
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
American Telephone & Tard Mobile?
My sister opened a computer store in Hawaii. She sells C shells by the seashore.
Err, I frequently get 2MB/s, during the middle of the day, no problem. Cable, not DSL -- the DSL in this area was.... less than reliable.
The argument carries over, though -- it's infrastructure. Infrastructure is infrastructure, wired or wireless.. more or less.
In Europe, you've got these INCREDIBLY dense population centers that extend, well.. the whole damned continent, really. The only sparsely inhabited areas of Europe are in the far north, up near the Laplanders. That's roughly analogous to America's "fly-over country". Except it's less than half the size, and it's at the very edge of the continent. Here in the US, it's a majority of our land area, and it's between our population centers. Even our population centers aren't as densely populated as Europe's, nor do the high density areas extend as far and as contiguously as they do in Europe.
Er, oh, and I'm giving speeds in MBps, not Mbps, soooooo actually that 2 MBps would be 16 Mbps. It's not half as bad as people make it out to be.
'course, I'm fortunate. I'm 2 hours north of Baltimore/DC, 3 hours south of NYC, 2 hours west of Philly, 3 hours east of Pittsburg. There's decent infrastructure surrounding me, but I'm not in such a highly populated area that everything is oversaturated and I'm not so far away from the major population centers that there's nobody willing to lay down the Last Mile to get here.
Now, you get a place like Japan or Korea? You get the same number of people in a smaller area, and the same thing as is the case in Europe is the case there but to an even greater degree. To reach 99% of the people with a connection of X speed, you've gotta put down big fat pipes over.. what, a few dozen miles maybe? Here in the states if you did that, you'd cover *maybe* two large cities, and tough balls to people living several hours away. America is a big, big, big place. People from Europe and Asia tend to not realize how large and expansive this country is.
We're not Canada, with almost all our population in a thin ribbon stretching east to west. Or, for that matter, Australia, with their population only really living around the edges of the ocean. The population distribution of the United States actually is more close to that of sub-Saharan Africa. Yeah... yeah.
Of course, that's just one excuse. The upgrade cycle is another -- Europe had to rebuild their infrastructure following WW2. We didn't. Most of ours was done in the 50s/60s/70s.. its life cycle wasn't far enough along to justify tearing it all up, whereas Europe's infrastructure needed replacement sooner.
... still waiting for this free-as-in-beer free beer I keep hearing about.
Everybody providing broadband or wireless internet connectivity does the same thing: overstate the capacity of their network as a selling point, then oversell the capacity to maximize profits. I could go into business as a broadband provider and claim "Up to a TERABIT per second downloads!" and it's not false advertising because I said the two magic words "up to". Never mind that I'm overselling the network capacity by 100 times and that if everybody got on and downloaded high-def movies at the same exact moment, crashing the whole network; I said "up to", I didn't claim a guaranteed minimum throughput, so I'm not lying; tough shit.
Everybody needs to know this, and understand it. Once that happens then everyone can get together and force them to change. Until then they'll claim whatever they want in order to get our money, and they'll get away with it.
Are YOU using the TOOL, or is the TOOL using YOU? Think about it!