Slashdot Mirror
iPhone 4S's Siri Is a Bandwidth Guzzler
Frankie70 writes "'Siri's dirty little secret is that she's a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.' A study by Arieso shows that users of the iPhone 4S demand three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, who were identified as the most demanding in a 2010 study. 'In all, Arieso says that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S "appears to unleash data consumption behaviors that have no precedent."'"
New phone debuts with cloud capabilities. People buy new phone, use the shit out of it, and also begin utilizing cloud functions. Of course bandwidth use is going to go up.
The real scandal here is that the carriers are pushing back, trying to keep bandwidth use down so they don't have to get off their asses invest more than they absolutely have to in network capacity.
I hope Apple won't patent bandwidth guzzling, as it would make their application steal the room left for others. But, since it is Apple, who knows...
This article is stupid and the Washington Post should be ashamed. ArsTechnica ran the numbers 2 months ago and came up with an average of 63KB per query, and even less for queries that were just voice commands for the phone itself (as opposed to an internet lookup).
If Siri is a bandwidth hog, $deity help us all, because that means all that voice traffic and streaming video we do on our phones and tablets must be killing cellular networks and running their bodies through the wood chipper.
The WaPo article is nothing more than sensationalist journalism, designed to foment controversy for the sake of attention and readership.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars
http://gigaom.com/2012/01/27/siri-is-not-a-bandwidth-hog-and-users-are-not-the-problem/
http://www.theverge.com/2012/1/27/2753694/siri-isnt-ruining-your-cellphone-service
And from my own personal experience as someone who has used an iPhone since the very first model, I have not found that Siri has noticeably increased my data usage. Other types of data access are far more intensive, such as streaming video and music, as well as sharing images/video taken with the iPhone's camera.
Welcome to the future. Just as the average web page size has bloated to over 1MB, the average data content in a single smartphone interaction will also grow in size until most peoples' montly data allowance just isn't enough. As more and more data caps are being brought to bear, data usage is going to become much more of an issue for people - at least once they realise they're paying 50 - 100% more for their 'actual' usage than they intended. I wonder how many of them will just accept the extra cost (therefore putting extra cash into the telcos pockets) rather than moderate their behaviour? This is a big deal right now in NZ, where you can pay a shedload of money per month for just 250MB of mobile data...I can only imagine it's going to get worse.
If it takes 64KB to communicate link navigation request using voice input, and ~1KB to do the same with a hyperlink, then yeah, that will have a pretty big impact on data usage. Of course, if you're shelling out up to $400 just for a phone, you probably don't care about the data cost.
"We receive as friendly that which agrees with, we resist with dislike that which opposes us" - Faraday
...is hot... http://www.imore.com/2012/01/27/siri-guest-stars-big-bang-theory/
If oil companies' made cars, would they be fuel efficient? Hell, no. The more gas sold, the more oil profits.
It is the same with phone companies. The want you to call and use a lot of data traffic. What they don't want, are flat rates, where they get stuck with the bill. They want to charge every second to the customer. And every bit of unused bandwidth is lost profit for them.
Schroedinger's Brexit: The UK is both in and out of the EU at the same time!
If I could program Siri so that when I said "Siri, add PERSON to the list!", she would respond "Yes sir. PERSON has been added to the list of people who can blow you," I would totally buy an iphone again. Just for that.
I'm trying to teach myself to set people on fire with my mind... Is it hot in here?
From their about page:
The company's solutions locate, store and analyse data from every call, providing operators with a rich source of information to boost network performance and enrich user experience.
Sounds like another company that just got pushed through the ringer.
Did you even read the article in question? It's just a re-hash of a press release, written by someone who doesn't seem to understand how any of these newfangled gadgets work.
Here, this is a quote from the article. See if you can read it without facepalming:
To continue with the author's car analogy, blaming your new phone for the fact that you download more with it is like blaming your car for a parking ticket. It's not the phone, it's the user.
Hell, if the author had bothered reading the study he linked to, he'd know the study was about data usage vs. phones. The summary page doesn't even mention Siri.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
I am just happy to have 2 year contract for unlimited bandwith & amount for 2 euros a month price.
Network gives good HSPA what means I have almost everywhere where I go a 14.4Mbits / 5.76Mbits and under 80ms pings.
2 euros a month for that connection is "just there". But when watching my typical data consuming, what is heavy, I would say that 5-10GB for typical user is more than enough. Sometimes personally I go over 20GB a month but that really demands lots of usage so that battery is empty almost everyday two times. And when I use phone as the hotspot/tethering for my and friends laptop, it goes over 30-40GB easily if using just steam.
At least when most of the country where I live has other unlimited amount but bandwidth limited to 1-2Mbits (what is more than enough for mobile devices, if upload just would be same instead just 42KB/s) and price being 5 euros a month I would say that is good deal as well. Or unlimited bandwidth but prioritizated amount after 50GB a month for 8 euros. A 50GB is hard to come even with heavy use.
I understand well how ISP's are having problems in USA when their basic network capacity is not taken care in the first place. Heck, even the GSM voice quality is crap when compared to EU countries.
At one point, I really wish that it would be custom to have a data plan for every citizen for free and bandwidth would be at least 256kbits while amount unlimited.
It would not be enough for all, but for most people it would be. At least when thinking about VoIP, Emails and basic surfing.
ID10Ts screaming about Siri's 'carbon footprint'
It's certainly the future but I think calling it beta is charitable. When it works right it's great but when it fails it's about as bad as all other voice recognition systems that came before.
It works just frequently enough and well enough for you to want to rely on it and fails just often enough that you're wanting to chuck the phone out the window in frustration.
I think the worst bit is the inconsistent network connectivity. Since every bit of voice processing is done off the phone, you're dependent on a network connection and there's no telling when Siri won't be able to reach the server. So you can tell it to set an appointment and it will get that and ask you to confirm it and you say yes and it fails. Or you could be speaking to it in a loud voice and it will either wait 5 seconds after you're speaking to accept what you said for processing or it will cut you off mid-speech to process only part of your request.
I'm not denying this is the future but it will probably take another iphone version number before they get the glitches ironed out.
Kwisatz Haderach
Sell the spice to CHOAM
This Mahdi took Shaddam's Throne
then that's probably the reason why we have Siri only on the 4S (yet).
Read up:
"When Barack Obama joined Silicon Valley’s top luminaries for dinner in California last February, each guest was asked to come with a question for the president. But as Steven P. Jobs of Apple spoke, President Obama interrupted with an inquiry of his own: what would it take to make iPhones in the United States?
Not long ago, Apple boasted that its products were made in America. Today, few are. Almost all of the 70 million iPhones, 30 million iPads and 59 million other products Apple sold last year were manufactured overseas.
Why can’t that work come home? Mr. Obama asked.
Mr. Jobs’s reply was unambiguous. “Those jobs aren’t coming back,” he said, according to another dinner guest."
See the entire article here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/01/22/business/apple-america-and-a-squeezed-middle-class.html?_r=2
Perhaps Siri is useful, so useful that it makes ppl use their iPhones for more things, more often.
What i find most fascinating abut siri is that it is advertised as a feature of the iphone 4 but in reality has nothing to do with it. transferring voice data has been around for a long time on mobile phones.
What country do you live in and can you provide a link to your ISP that provides such a great deal?
Stretch marks treatment
I thank you for giving these tips to the readers. There are a lot of people who are not familiar with these kind of things. I know many of us will appreciate this article. Thanks for sharing this.
I think that free ( a french isp) does provide that kind of prices in bundle with other services. it costs 10â for unlimited wired connection, tv, wired phone and hspa/3gi dont know the offer too well, im in belgium and i pay like 80â for the same service.( 40â for unlimited wired internet. and 35â for 1gb hspa a month (and no freaking TV) so yeah I feel somewhat ripped off. the euro sign didnt come out as expected sorry.
No the real scandal is the carriers marketing these phones based on all these data intensive features and one or more of the following:
1) Not upgrading the infrastructure to support the offerings.
Inadequate density of towers in metros, lack of coverage or obsolete network support in other areas
2) Not being realistic about the actual cost of the services with typical use cases
They need to be clear that if you stream Netflix for an hour and half at the gym everyday in additon to other use it my run you a few grand in overages
3) Not being realistic about presentation of use cases.
Stop showing people they can stream music and video constantly in the ads unless, they can (for an affordable price)
4) Not being able to actually support the products and features they are selling even if they did upgrade infrastructure and selling it anyway.
Spectrum is limited, it might actually not be possible to put one of these handsets in every pocket.
Repeal the 17th Amendment TODAY! Also Please Read http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/right-to-read.html
The H1 actually gets fairly good mileage for its size because its diesel... the H2 is the 10 MPG beast. You know, just splitting hairs ;-)
take a photo of police doing naughty things? Best to have the photo "in the cloud" before they can confiscate camera.
The police can just confiscate the cloud. Megaupload anyone?
But do "a few shell scripts + ftpd + ftp + cron" come preloaded onto PCs and non-Apple mobile devices? If a user has to write "a few shell scripts" himself, 99% won't. And how much does a server running ftpd cost per year to lease?
Also large processing cost best sent off to a server in "the cloud" to save on battery charge.
Battery charge isn't the only thing called "charge"; carriers also "charge" customers. How expensive is the electric energy to recharge the battery compared to the overage fee if an application causes the user to exceed a monthly data transfer cap?
Yeah, we'd never want any articles about the world's most valuable tech company on a tech forum, amiright?
the fact that the extra $40/mo they're paying for the cell phone over a contract on a "discount" carrier (most of whom are owned by the same companies they're buying from in the first place)
The "discount" carrier is also likely to be unable or unwilling to activate its parent company's phones or "unlocked" phones. Good luck getting an iPhone to work on the U.S. networks of Boost or Virgin, even though their parent company Sprint offers an iPhone. It was only recently that Virgin Mobile USA got Android phones.
the fundamental functionality of voice recognitions does *not* depend on internet access
It does depend on access to a processor powerful enough to run the voice recognition and enough energy to do so. Handheld devices have far less capable processors and far less available energy than servers in a datacenter.
The "discount" carrier is also likely to be unable or unwilling to activate its parent company's phones or "unlocked" phones. Good luck getting an iPhone to work on the U.S. networks of Boost or Virgin, even though their parent company Sprint offers an iPhone. It was only recently that Virgin Mobile USA got Android phones.
You'd be wrong. :) If I buy a phone through Koodo, they'll unlock it through their website, as long as my account is in good standing (no money owing, and no late payments on my bill over the last 3 months. They're more expensive than going through a company like gsmliberty.net, but they will do it.
And they will indeed activate their parent company's phones. They'll also activate phones from other carriers. In fact, their website actively encourages you to unlock your phone and bring it to them, and provides an easy way to check whether a phone on another network will work with theirs: http://koodomobile.com/en/on/switch2koodo.shtml My phone actually is one that was sold originally by the parent company for Koodo, and I've had it on 4 different networks in Canada without needing to replace it. (actually, it's getting a bit long in the tooth, and I've been shopping around for a replacement)
If I was travelling to the US, I'd just buy a US prepaid SIM and put it in my phone. There are US carriers who will sell you a SIM without selling you a phone, and as long as the network is either quad-band GSM or 850/1900/2100 HSPA or WCDMA, my phone will work. That means I can use t-mob, ATT, VZW, or any of the carriers that use their networks, as long as I can get my hands on a SIM and put minutes on it. In the US, I admit that's a bit difficult, but $2/day unlimited everything pay as you go from ATT is quite amenable for a short trip, and they were happy sell me a SIM without a phone when I needed one last summer. Sprint is a special animal... for some reason, they still use CDMA for their network, and have not gone to WCDMA with SIM cards yet. All of the other major players in the US use SIM cards, however, and can work with any unlocked phone as long as the phone supports the appropriate frequencies.
The silly notion that Siri is a data hog has been all over the internet, although if you think about it, it is obviously ridiculous. All Siri sends upstream some highly compressed voice, which doesn't take much bandwidth, and all it gets back is text and some simple commands to Apple's apps, which also doesn't take much bandwidth. Ars Technica measured the amount of data Siri sends back and forth, and it's just as modest as you'd expect.
So why are owners of the iPhone 4s using more data? Apples latest version of iOS, which was released about the same time as the 4s, dispenses with the requirement to tether the iPhone to a computer running iTunes, for the first time making it possible to use an iPhone as a stand-alone device. You can back up your iPhone and even install iOS updates wirelessly. In addition, Apple's Match service will stream your entire music library to your iPhone wirelessly via Apple's iCloud. Owners of earlier iPhone models are already set up to do these things via a wired connection to iTunes, and many of them doubtless have continued to do it this way even if they've upgraded to iOS version 5. But new owners of the iPhone 4s (of which there are a great number, based on Apple's quarterly report) are probably mostly using their iPhones as stand-alone devices, which is now the default. And of course, this involves more data usage, of which the biggest contributor is likely music streaming.
So Siri has almost nothing to do with the increased data usage of iPhone 4s owners--it just happens to correlates with people who are using their iPhones untethered.
Wealth may not be an indicator of value, but the size of a company definitely does impact how newsworthy it is. If my local computer shop does something, then this is far less likely to be newsworthy than if, say HP does the same thing, simply because it will affect a lot more people.
I am TheRaven on Soylent News
For me, and for many others, the thing which is most important by far is
whether the PHONE can be used to make and receive PHONE CALLS.
All too often, the phone doesn't work at all or it works intermittently.
I'm tired of this crap.
Of course not if it isn't free or bashing FB or MS it isn't welcome.
AT&T keeps threatening raising rates on bandwidth heavy users. I would say having an iPhone (4S anyhow) on their network doesn't bode well.
Actually, having any service with AT&T doesn't bode well for that person.
http://arstechnica.com/apple/news/2011/11/how-data-heavy-is-siri-on-an-iphone-4s-ars-investigates.ars
"We performed six tasks that would be considered to be local tasks. These queries included things like, "Set an alarm for 3 hours from now," "Make an appointment for 2pm on Friday" (and then telling Siri to cancel the task), "Remind me to file expense reports when I get home," and "What is the contact info for Ars Technica?"
These tasks added up to a total of 220KB of data usage, or an average of 36.7KB per query. The actual numbers ranged from 60KB down to 18KB, and we believe this is correlated to the complexity of the specific query and language we used to perform it.
The five other tasks were ones that required lookups online—some of them were questions that Siri could get from Wolfram Alpha, while others prompted us to continue to search on the Web (thereby bringing up a Google search page with the wording that we had asked Siri). Some sample questions included "How many calories in a muffin?", "How many movies has Kevin Bacon been in?" (this required a Google lookup, which we said yes to), and "What is Lady Gaga's real name?"
These five tasks added up to a total of 473.5KB of data use, or an average of 94.72KB per query. The range went from 23KB to 187KB, depending on the question at hand.
Someone inside Apple may have forgotten the "unaffiliated" part.
And that t-mobile didn't get the iPhone.
Interesting fact (and the reason I'm posting anonymously): t-mobile had a plan for the takeover to drop chunks of their customers to other providers (not including ATT), regardless of levels of service, so that they could meet the Federal spectrum requirements. ATT didn't want the customers, they just wanted the spectrum, and they were going to screw over a huge number of t-mobile customers to do it.
That kind of depends on what it is that they are doing. Let us say microsoft wants to put a something in orbit not really newsworth as opposed to Mr fixit PC repair center on 3rd street sending something up into space
Perspective my friend is important
have you seen my sig? there are many others like it but none that are the same
Did anyone even bother reading the study before responding to this obvious troll? All the study does is correlate or trend higher data consumption to iPhone 4S devices. Any guesses as to the reason why, are just speculation and are unrelated to the actual study. There is nothing in this study related to Siri. The Washington Post piece is just really really bad reporting. Paul Farhi should go take some classes in journalism and learn to cite sources that actually support his wild accusations.
is full of examples of businesses that overbuilt and had excess capacity of need at the point of winning.
(newsflash, businesses that try to stay LEAN on expenses are the ones who usually win)
every day http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Special:Random
That company holds no value to me.
So the networks are supposed to pony up unlimited bandwidth and not charge the highest bandwidth users for the cost of upgrading their networks and acquiring bandwidth to implement it?
Talk about a feeling of entitlement!
The unconscionable thing is what's really happening in the marketplace: lower bandwidth users are subsidizing the costs of network upgrades that are made necessary only to satisfy the desires of the highest-bandwidth users. But it still makes sense from the carriers' perspective: they collect as much revenue as they can by charging whatever the market will bear.
You're conflating the concepts of wealth and value and using the terms in a lazy manner to make your shitty point. Plus the fact that you're not an authority on what "techies" or "intelligent" people consider, maybe not writing things should be a future pursuit of yours.
Slashdot is proof that Sturgeon's Law applies to mankind.
People who most heavily use a phone are the most likely to upgrade.
People who less heavily use a phone care less and don't upgrade as much.
The iPhone 4s has the heavy users who've migrated.
Leaving the iPhone 4 with still fairly heavy users who're stuck in a contract and so it's not quite worth upgrading.
Leaving the iPhone 3Gs users who are the ones who could've upgraded if they cared but their phone works and they don't do much with it anyway so why bother.
So clearly it's the new feature, Siri, on the iPhone 4s and not that heavier users are simply the ones who upgrade.
In other news, the s on the logo uses 20% more bandwidth! Scientists investigating bandwidth savings if only Apple would consider other lower bandwidth letters!
Although, sadly, as most blogs have discovered: Sensational headlines, even if untrue, do get attention. And scientists, even more sadly, are learning that attention, even in place of good science or basic statistical understanding, gets research funding.
Wow, talk about misrepresenting the articles.
Here is the data from the original article:
Data calls per subscriber:
HTC Google Nexus One: 221%
Sony Ericsson Xperia X10i: 157%
HTC Desire: 156%
Uplink data volumes:
3G Modems (various): 2654%
HTC Desire S: 323%
iPhone 4S: 320%
Downlink data volumes:
3G Modems (various): 2432%
iPhone 4S: 276%
Samsung Galaxy S: 199%
The Washington Post article, mentions the 4S as "Siri equipped". No one is saying much about Siri here at all.
Yes it does seem incredible. Recently Free in France introduce a plan at 2 Euros per month, but it's for 60 mn voice + 60 SMS and no data. For a 3 GB data plan (no limit, but rate shaped at 3 GB) with unlimited everything else it's 20 Euros a month, which is already quite cheap.
Next post:
A study shows: https://www.google.com/search?q=study+shows&um=1&ie=UTF-8&hl=en&tbm=isch&source=og&sa=N&tab=wi&authuser=0&ei=guIkT5v3Nu3XiQKx3YHwBw&biw=1233&bih=1162&sei=juIkT5a2E8XkiAL265XDBw
now magically the usage data for ios in comparison to android grew 10 fold, makes the graphs look prettier so apple looks like it owns more share on the internet. - apple fan
I was working with transcription softwares of Siri's parent company Nuance. The files come after voice recognition. All of the voice recognition I believe is done in the servers of Nuance, not in our systems with the client software. (They actually do very good voice recognition). Extrapolating from there, voice recognition by Siri for iPhone is also done at the servers, which means a lot of voice files need to be transferred to the server.
It all depends on how you define value. If you define value by the amount of social good done instead...
At least in Canada, these (Bell, Rogers) are the exact same guys to advertize faster download speeds for music and video with their services, while all the time throttling all p2p traffic... They also take faster connections, and put low caps on them, with high penalty if you go over. That's how they roll. These corporations are crazy, they only way to make any sense of them is in terms of profit. Up here at least there is very little choice, and your only option really is to go without, which today isn't really a viable option. People are starting to wake up, but it will take awhile for the mainstream voters to get involved. Until these issues and the regulation by CRTC (which realistically doesn't seem to be able to be up to it) gets elevated to the point where people really start to take notice (and thus become issues politically) nothing is going to change up here.
With that enabled, every 8-megapixel photo you take with a 4S is immediately uploaded over the cell network.
Taking a dozen photos with PhotoStream on would far surpass the about 20 MB per month for Siri that Ars Technica estimated.