As an iPhone addict I walk around with my iPhone on a regular basis.   I went to New York City for a holiday weekend a few weeks back.  As I walked around Manhattan I noticed that it seemed most everybody had some kind of Smartphone. The interesting thing was that if I had been in Manhattan 5 years ago I would have seen everybody walking around with the phone to their ear.  This time everybody was walking around with their eyes glued to the little screen social networking, using Google Maps, or walking and checking email.

The other thing I noticed was the battery consumption on my phone.  I live in Tucson, Arizona.  As you can imagine it’s a much different place than New York in many ways.  But one of them for sure is the battery life of my iPhone.  In Arizona, my iPhone will go a few days between charges while on stand-by and most of the day if I am out and about using it to look things up, check my email, and even take the occasional call.  It’s kind of old school, but I still actually call people on the phone.

Anyway, while in New York my battery was lasting less than 4 hours.  When I checked the cellular data usage meter on my phone (its under the “about” menu for all the non-iPhone users) it showed my phone was transmitting more than 2 Mbytes every hour and receiving more than 2 Mbytes every hour and this was with it in my pocket, not doing anything.

So I tried all the well known tricks to extend the battery life like turning off 3G and using only EDGE, turning off the blue-tooth, turning off the Wi-Fi, turning off push notifications, and setting the email to manual mode retrieval so that it wouldn’t try getting my email in the background.  But none of these things seem to have any impact whatsoever.   I then even “disabled” my mail accounts on my iPhone as all I really wanted was my phone to be ready to receive a call as I was expecting an important one.

Even after doing all this, my battery life didn’t get any better nor did it stop my phone from using cellular data. As one could imagine by now I was getting quite frustrated and as I dwelled upon it I convinced myself the only other possibility was that my phone had a rogue application (i.e. virus) running on it.  So, I proceeded to do a hard reset to set it back to the factory defaults.  I learned the hard way that after doing this the iPhone has to be re-initialized by connecting to iTunes and having done this in a city park meant I didn’t have my laptop and iTunes nearby.  So I now had to find a store for my carrier to see if they could help.  Fortunately there was one nearby and they kindly re-initialized my phone.  The clerk at the store asked why I had done this, and I explained the story about my battery.  She responded that this is a common problem for all the iPhones in New York due to the over-subscribed network.

I don’t know if she knew what she was talking about or not.  We have all heard complaints about certain networks in New York.  So I don’t know if this was some kind of phone chatter due to my phone constantly re-attaching to the network or if it was something more malicious like a battery drain attack on my phone from the network.

This got me to thinking about what is going to happen to all the iPhone users on some of the recently announced capped data plans where subscribers are liable for data overage charges.  Personally I would be really unhappy to find out my iPhone was running up my bill even though I wasn’t using it.   I am not sure what various carriers plan to do here, but they certainly will need to be planning on not counting that kind of traffic towards people’s monthly caps as otherwise they will have a lot of people switching to another carrier.

Now, at Sandvine I know we have a set of solutions that mobile carriers could use to classify and meter the traffic to ensure that rogue traffic doesn’t create bill-shock as well mitigates network security attacks.  And my experience in New York clearly shows that operators cannot count all traffic equally as there is a lot of traffic that is beyond the user’s control.

Anyway, it will be interesting to see how this all unfolds.  Needless to say the mobile data space is in one of those interesting periods.

And since returning home, my phone is working fine.  So it wasn’t the battery nor was it a rogue application.  The best I can tell, it was something to do with the network.