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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."'"

15 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 Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    2. Re:Well, duh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Informative

      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.

    3. Re:Well, duh by Hognoxious · · Score: 5, Funny

      That would require an extra input field which would ruin the GUI's feng shui.

      --
      Confucius say, "Find worm in apple - bad. Find half a worm - worse."
    4. Re:Well, duh by liquidsin · · Score: 5, Interesting

      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.

      myopic and misplaced. that's like bitching that the problem with ford owners is that they don't understand the engineering behind road design. this is not a failing of the user; this is a failing of the cell phone providers to scale up their architecture appropriately for new technology. they absolutely had to know that every new generation of phone is bringing new ways to use data, and that they're selling them more now than ever, and that people are becoming permanently "connected" more and more by the hour. instead of spending their record-breaking profits on new laws and huge bonuses they could have been expanding their network capabilities and increasing service levels and satisfaction. but hey, screwing customers and litigating show up prettier on this quarter's reports.

      --
      do not read this line twice.
    5. Re:Well, duh by somersault · · Score: 5, Informative

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

      --
      which is totally what she said
    6. Re:Well, duh by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Interesting

      As a developer I find the APIs around iCloud are what make it interesting, and more than just storage. The file coordination APIs let an app on one device say "I'm about to show the user this file", and iCloud will tell another device that's currently editing the file "hey, the user wants to see that file on another device, please save it now" and send the diffs to iCloud, which sends the diffs to the device so the user gets the current version of the document without having to manually save it. I'm not aware of any other cloud type storage system that does this.

    7. 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?

    8. 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.

    9. Re:Well, duh by Y-Crate · · Score: 5, Informative

      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)

  2. Siri Is Not A Bandwidth Hog; 63KB/Query by rsmith-mac · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

  3. 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.

  4. 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.

  5. Well, duh. by MrEricSir · · Score: 5, Informative

    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.

    --
    There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
  6. Re:The police can just confiscate the cloud by Sponge+Bath · · Score: 5, Funny

    They can't do that to iCloud because Apple protects it with teams of iNinjas.