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

Well, duh

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

Re:Well, duh

[Anonymous Coward]

Which would be a complete and accurate statement if I was unreeling a fiber behind my phone everywhere I go.

In the real world, backhaul is not always the limiting factor; in many metro areas, the RF segment is at capacity during peak hours, and the only fix is more spectrum or more cells. (Which just makes fixed caps look silly -- there's no reason but greed to charge users in overserved rural areas for using the available bandwidth, and even where bandwidth is tight, flat caps don't discriminate between harmless off-peak use and problematic peak use.)

Re:Well, duh

[Anonymous Coward]

cloud capabilities = connecting to a server across the internet

I think the real problem with Apple users is how clueless they are about technology. Cell phone towers are easily overloaded so you really shouldn't use them for things like backups. Wait until you get home or go to your public library or starbucks or something.

I just took 700 picture of my weekend in Cancun, I better upload them all to facebook! I don't even know how to connect to the airport's cafeteria's wifi, so I'll just use whatever my phone chooses...

And before some guy chimes in that he SSHs from his jailbroken iphone, yes I know you are not clueless. The art student, the soccer mom, the hot chick at the club, the spoiled middle school kid, the guy with the tiny small busiiness that has to have the most expensive toys. Those people are the clueless iphone users I am talking about. You know, the 99 percent.

Re:Well, duh

[AmiMoJo]

I bet a lot of people would be surprised to know that Siri uses bandwidth though. The fact that the phone doesn't do the work and what they said is transmitted to Apple doesn't seem to register with most people.

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

That's nonsense. It's fair to say that if data usage is high then particular factors might contribute to that, but if you don't know whether data usage is in fact high then you can't authoritatively state what is contributing to it. You clearly don't have enough information to analyse the causes of a problem if there are doubts over whether the problem exists.

Re:Well, duh

[Truekaiser]

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

I can see why they resurrected it though, millions of people use their phones and computers now to store personal information. if you can somehow get them to willingly hand that over you have the modern golden egg laying goose. you can mine that data for ad revenue. use it as leverage to get tax breaks from the governments of the area's you physically store it, in exchange for letting them have access of course.

it's only natural for the beast that is a corporation to try to get into the golden trough of revenue that this is. especially carriers. there is a reason they are clamping down on data usage and it has nothing to do with how much capacity they have. it has everything to do with the money they earn from you while you try to access your personal data off these cloud services.

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

Re:Well, duh

[DarkOx]

I will grand that it *nice* useful and more importantly usable for lots of people but lets be really honest about what it is. Its nothing a few shell scripts + ftpd + ftp + cron have not been able to do for 30+ years. If you find iCloud *exciting* its because you don't really understand the technology.

Re:Well, duh

[stewbacca]

Something tells me you are overstating Blackberry's achievements in this arena, given their current market position.

Re:Well, duh

[The Second Horseman]

It's worse than that - they're actually pushing costs off onto wifi providers. Any crowded place with unmetered wifi - Coffee shops, college networks, hotels, etc. are getting hammered by crap like this, and in some cases aren't budgeted for it. And it's not "just get another access point" - it's the amount of traffic - 802.11 and otherwise - in that spectrum. There's a point where there's just too much traffic, and adding additional equipment won't fix the problem. We can't turn every room into a Faraday Cage. Even crowded apartment buildings are starting to see problems with interference between apartments.

And, yes, I am making a value judgement on the feature. If you've got working fingers, you can type and not bother the rest of us with your voice. This is on par with Nextel users who used to use the "push to talk" feature back in the day, would hold the phone a foot away from their face, and yell into it while the phone blasted the other party out on a speaker. This using this thing around other people is the aural equivalent of someone going out of their way to fart in a crowded room.

Re:Well, duh

[ceoyoyo]

"I think the real problem with Apple users is how clueless they are about technology."

iCloud backups occur only over wifi, only if the phone is plugged in.

Should have Googled that one first hey?

Re:Well, duh

[Sponge Bath]

I think the real problem with Apple users is how clueless they are about technology.

A small subset of users of any mobile phone are technologically literate, and the rest are just people who want to use their phones. I think the real problem with Apple haters is they are clueless about their own bias.

Re:Well, duh

[elashish14]

Non sequitur. Market share is not an indication of technological capability

Re:Well, duh

[__aaltlg1547]

I don't understand why people state that Siri requires huge demands on network capacity. Cellular networks are built to handle voice data in real time.

A typical few-second snippet of voice data at full rate (uncompressed) would only take a few tens of kilobytes to transmit at voice-grade compression. And it needn't even be in real time. 4G and even 3G networks are built to handle high multiples of those rates for multiple users simultaneously.

If Siri is consuming massive amounts of network bandwidth, it could only be due to extremely inefficient implementation or extremely high rates of use. So either Apple has made a really crappy technical implementation of sending data or, more likely, delivered a service that's incredibly irresistable to users.

rebuttals to the study and WaPo article

[wickerprints]

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.

Exceeding monthly data caps is the new black

[boundary]

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.

Re:Exceeding monthly data caps is the new black

[tukang]

If everyone did that, what do you think would happen to the caps?

Voice command vs. Hyperlink

[davide marney]

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.

Carriers *want* you to guzzle

[PolygamousRanchKid]

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.

Can You Program Siri?

[Greyfox]

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.

Re:I hope Apple won't patent bandwidth guzzling

[Anonymous Coward]

Slashdot: Where smug assholes set up straw men, smugly beat them down, and then whine that Apple users are too smug.

Real Scandal

[DarkOx]

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.

The police can just confiscate the cloud

[tepples]

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?

Re:Hi!

[stewbacca]

Yeah, we'd never want any articles about the world's most valuable tech company on a tech forum, amiright?

Re:Siri

[SpinyNorman]

The point to be understood here is that Siri is not merely about voice transcription, nor is it about the transfer of voice input. That is just one part of the process. The next part is using the result of its transcription algorithm as input to a natural language processing engine that likely uses various other statistical methods to pick out certain words, analyze the grammatical structure of the input, and determine the sentence's most likely intent. This is what Wolfram|Alpha attempts to do. The final part is to have the computer search what resources are available to it and provide data or perform an action that (hopefully) is what the user wanted. None of these steps are trivial.

Actually you've entirely missed what's at the core of Siri, and you're also wrongly giving Wolfram Alpha the credit for figuring out the intent of what you're asking Siri to do!

The core technology of Siri is the artificial intelligence component which was originally developed by SRI (S.R.I = "Siri") under a US army DARPA contract. The SRI project was called "Cognitive Agent that Learns and Organizes" (CALO), and was then taken by the startup company Siri who extended it into what it is today. Siri was then aquired by Apple.

The DARPA/SRI/Siri AI component is where the intelligence of Siri comes from - how it figures out what you mean (maintaining the conversation context and asking for clarification if needed) and how to do it. In some cases it might do what you ask by interfacing with applications (calendar, e-mail, etc) on your iPhone, in other cases it may do a web search or go to Wolfram Alpha to find or calculate information you've asked for, and in other cases it goes out to specialized web service to do "real world" stuff like ordering taxis or making restaurant reservations that you've asked for.

Wolfram Alpha has nothing to do with the smarts of Siri - it's merely one service that Siri uses once it's done the hard part of figuring out what you want and determining that Alpha is the appropriate way to do what you want. It's no different to Siri sometime using web search to get info for you if it figures out that's what it needs to do.

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

[ceoyoyo]

That's considerably smaller than the average size of a web page today. I wonder how big an average Wolfram Alpha page is... Siri might be an overall bandwidth saver.

Re:Hi!

[TheRaven64]

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.