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NTT DoCoMo Asks Google To Limit Android Data Use
An anonymous reader writes "NTT DoCoMo has had enough of Android's effects on its mobile network in Japan. Following a service disruption due to Google's Android VoIP app, the company is now asking Google to look at reducing Android's data use. In particular, the amount of time allowed between control signals being sent either by official apps or 3rd party ones. Typically these occur as often as every 3 minutes, but scale that up to thousands of apps on millions of handsets and you can see the issue DoCoMo has. So, does DoCoMo need to invest more in its infrastructure, or is Android a data hog that needs reining in?"
It's not that simple on a wireless connection where everyone shares the medium. For communications originating at the phone, the network provider can't do any throttling until the packet has already been received at their equipment, because they don't control the phone's transmitter. By that time, the bandwidth on the wireless link has already been consumed and wasn't available to other users. If the control signals originate at the server, the network provider could throttle it, but setting it up isn't trivial, and then you have problems like the servers sending retries because they aren't getting responses from the phone. The best solution requires cooperation from the OS and/or application writers.
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Docomo seems to claim that it's background sync/checking traffic - but Google makes a point of reducing this as much as possible. There's good reason to do this - the less often data is transferred to keep "checked in", the less often a device needs to wake up, and the better battery life is.
This is, for example, why IM apps that use Google C2DM (Such as Google Talk - but any IM app author can use C2DM) have a minimal impact on battery life, while poorly written apps that are not even remotely suited to mobile devices (like Skype) are massive battery hogs.
If Google's services are "checking in" that often on DoCoMo, it's probably because DoCoMo's NAT boxes are broken - http://conferences.sigcomm.org/sigcomm/2011/slides/s374.pdf
retrorocket.o not found, launch anyway?
They have a right to make money in return
No, they have the right to try to make money in return. If they can't make money without constantly changing the rules instead of their strategy they should go out of business. I'm sure others could use the spectrum.