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."'"

Comments

Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query

[rsmith-mac]

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).

In total, our 11 queries added up to 693.6KB, or an average of 63KB per query. As you can see above, Siri tasks that are local to the phone appear to require less data than ones that need further lookups on the Internet, which makes sense.

If you use Siri 2-3 times per day at an average of 63KB per instance, you might expect to use 126KB to 189KB per day, or 3.7 to 5.5MB per month. For 4-6 times a day, that might come out to 252KB to 378KB per day, or 7.4 to 11MB per month. If you use it 10-15 times per day, you might end up using 630KB to 945KB per day, or 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.

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.

Re:Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query

[pthisis]

People who do no more than 10-15 searches a day aren't on the radar when it comes to worrying about bandwidth hogs. The real question is how much does each Siri search use compared to an old-style web search (I suspect the answer is "a lot more", probably more than 10 times as much) and whether for heavy users that approaches a significant percentage of overall use (I suspect the answer is "no, when you're listening to a couple of podcasts and watching a vid or two and surfing the web heavily, a few dozen Siri searches doesn't mean all that much).

But mentioning the light users is totally disingenuous--light users aren't where bandwidth concerns are met.

Re:Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query

[Lord_Jeremy]

Furthermore, the 4S has a higher resolution camera than previous phones, and the launch of the iCloud service means people are probably uploading things like photos to their cloud storage accounts. +1 TFA is a troll.

Re:Well, duh

[Anonymous Coward]

iCloud and the updated 4S camera is indeed partially to blame if indeed data usage is as high as reported, however the article is flawed if this Ars article is correct.

Well, duh.

[MrEricSir]

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:

A study published this month by Arieso, an Atlanta firm that specializes in mobile networks, found that the Siri-equipped iPhone 4S uses twice as much data as does the plain old iPhone 4 and nearly three times as much as does the iPhone 3G. The new phone requires far more data than most other advanced smartphones, which are pretty data-intensive themselves, The Post has reported.

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.

Re:Well, duh

[Anonymous Coward]

It does. In this case Siri, a pretty, local front-end for a remote web service.

Your dislike of flowery marketing words doesn't make them entirely meaningless.

Re:Exceeding monthly data caps is the new black

[Kjella]

Or it'll be like with Internet connections, remember pay per minute on those? Oh, I sure do. Remember caps and additional money/MB too? Oh yes. Turns out in general people don't like it. Most of us were willing to pay a good price simply to not have to worry about what next month's Internet bill would be. If I end up in the hospital a month and use zero bytes of bandwidth, I'm still going to pay the same. And that's the way I like it. I'm pretty sure that as the market matures cell phone data plans will get more sane too. Actually, checking now the ideal plan if you're a heavy data user in Norway: Netcom Fastpris Data, 249 NOK = 43 USD per month, free data usage, speed reduced to 120 kbps after 5GB. Regular subscriptions on the largest carriers are capped at 400-600 NOK or 70-100 USD so you can't go over that in a single month even if you are online 24x7.

Just don't use your smartphone abroad. Ever. Or if you must then enable, get your shit done and disable is ASAP. Might not be such a big deal in the US but imagine you had an inter-state charge that could be several dollars per megabyte. That's what it's like in Europe now, the moment you cross the border all rules change. They're supposed to block you after 500 NOK (85 USD) but sometimes they don't and it's your problem. Every so often you get news stories about them charging people thousands of dollars for that shit, total ripoff. Know where the off button is and use it. You'll enjoy your vacation more too, plus it does wonders for your battery life. You don't get to chit-chat with your phone though...

Re:Well, duh

[somersault]

Actually, Blackberrys have been doing it for a while too.

Re:Well, duh

[Maow]

'cloud' junk is just the rebirth, or in this case the reanimation. of the dead and i thought buried dumb terminal architectural model.

Except that "smart" phones (I hate that phrase even more than "cloud" stuff) are decidedly not dumb terminals. There's more computing power in each one than a lot of the servers that the dumb terminals used to connect to.

if you don't want to be milked, just say no to any of these stupid 'cloud' services..

It's not a stupid service for my phone to upload (sometimes via Wifi, regardless at zero extra cost to me) to my "cloud" storage at Ubuntu One. I doubt Ubuntu / Canonical will be marketing to me by looking at my photos (or files), but if they do, I can just ignore it like I do all the other marketing I'm exposed to...

Really, there is a use for "cloud" services: for example, take a photo of police doing naughty things? Best to have the photo "in the cloud" before they can confiscate camera.

Camera memory card is getting full? Upload a few photos to the "cloud", delete them from camera, keep taking photos.

Re:Well, duh

[samkass]

The interesting thing, though, is that Siri itself is NOT a bandwidth hog. Ars and others have tested it and it actually doesn't use much bandwidth at all. But it makes the phone SO much more useful that people are sucking down three times as much information if they have Siri to help them find it.

Re:Well, duh

[Y-Crate]

From the Ars link:

If you use Siri 2-3 times per day at an average of 63KB per instance, you might expect to use 126KB to 189KB per day, or 3.7 to 5.5MB per month. For 4-6 times a day, that might come out to 252KB to 378KB per day, or 7.4 to 11MB per month. If you use it 10-15 times per day, you might end up using 630KB to 945KB per day, or 18.5 to 27.7MB per month.

Yeah, Siri is not really a bandwidth hog at all. 63KB is about the same amount of data needed to get you one image on one web page. Browse something as innocuous as a few news articles? Congrats, you've used more data than Siri will during an average day.

Sprint has come out and said that the average iPhone owner burns through 50% less bandwidth than the average 3G / 4G user on another platform.

Sprint's CEO was cited elsewhere saying that Android apps tend to be "more chatty" with the network, and the iPhone does a better job of offloading data to WiFi whenever possible. And the App store does its part too. If you try to download a large app over the cell network, it will throw up a little alert window and ask you to try to download it over WiFi instead. (Before you complain, that's a mandate from the carriers, Apple has been trying to raise the limit)