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iPhone 4S's Siri Is a Bandwidth Guzzler

Posted by timothy on from the at-least-data-is-free dept.

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."'"

5 of 290 comments (clear)

  1. Well, duh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

    1. Re:Well, duh by ceoyoyo · · Score: 5, Insightful

      "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?

    2. Re:Well, duh by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 5, Insightful

      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.

  2. rebuttals to the study and WaPo article by wickerprints · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.

  3. Exceeding monthly data caps is the new black by boundary · · Score: 5, Insightful

    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.