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.

Here in Canada, the games are broadcast live on CBC and are simultaneously available for streaming from the CBC’s website.  Rogers is also making the games available with their Rogers On Demand TV and website services, which also provide live streaming to mobile devices.

CBC’s service uses the Akamai content delivery network to power their streaming, and the results have been stellar – just look at the detail in the screenshot below.

You can see the akamaihd network at work in the bottom left:

The World Cup possesses a combination of factors that are contributing to its significant Internet presence:

• It is the ultimate competition in the world’s most popular sport, and sporting events must be seen live by diehard fans
• It has global popularity, even in countries who didn’t send a team to South Africa
• Games take place over a period of many hours, spanning many time-zones, so a large number of workers engage in streaming activities at the office (where TV viewing is typically not available)

Other events in the last few years have possessed one or two of these characteristics (for instance, President Obama’s inauguration), but none have had all three to the extent that the World Cup has.

Many service providers have tools in place that can measure the bandwidth impact – one such tool is Sandvine’s recently-launched Network Data Analytics product.  One of the features of this product is a Network Summary dashboard that captures how the network is performing, and illustrates the shifting nature of Internet traffic profiles.  A particular tool on this dashboard is a series of “Top 25” lists that highlight popular websites, video providers, and applications.  One of the early adopters of Network Data Analytics is a Canadian service provider, and the impact of the World Cup on this provider’s network was immediate.

Here is a snapshot of the Top 25 Websites list from June 15th, note that akamaihd.net has surged onto the list.  The snapshot shows the traffic from the previous day, so on June 14th, akamaihd.net was the 12th largest website on this network, by total bytes.  We can also see that on June 13th, the site was the 19th most popular, and between June 13th and June 14th, akamaihd.net increased in total bytes by more than 80%.  Clearly, this service is coming out of nowhere to become a significant generator of traffic on the network.

Indeed, by June 18th, akamaihd.net had risen to second-place, behind only YouTube, and was still increasing its byte usage at an astonishing rate of more than 80% day-over-day.

By June 22nd, the growth had slowed somewhat, and YouTube still held onto its lead – however, let’s keep in mind that Canada is not competing in this World Cup, so the fact that CBC’s streaming is enjoying such success is a testament to the infectious nature of the event.

Figure 1 – June 15th, 2010	Figure 2 – June 18th, 2010	Figure 3 – June 22nd, 2010

While network use is good for service providers, it can also be a double-edged sword, particularly in the case of sensitive applications such as real-time streaming.  Content delivery networks certainly help to maintain high levels of subscriber quality of experience by optimizing delivery, but the network is still a limited and shared resource, so providers need to pay close attention to applications that suddenly explode in popularity.  In particular, network operators need to engineer their network such that it can accommodate abnormal surges of Internet traffic (some predictable, some unpredictable), especially when such events overlap with Internet peak usage periods, in order to safeguard the subscriber experience.

While some providers will reap the rewards of the World Cup’s popularity thanks to consumption-based billing and high subscriber satisfaction, others are struggling with overwhelming data levels and problems with filtering technologies.  Those service providers who have invested in traffic measurement and network policy control tools are in a perfect position to smoothly manage and benefit from this type of network usage scenario – for others, the 2010 FIFA World Cup South Africa might be just the event to sell them on the value of such tools.

So let’s talk about data or more specifically unlimited data and the growing number of service providers who are rolling out plans that better reflect user behavior. Its probably worth noting here that there were never really any completely unlimited plans, they all had some fair-use limit. The sea-change is in the overage charge model. O2 announced last week that they will end unlimited data plans for their smart phone customers later this month as did AT&T early in June (Source: http://www.engadget.com/2010/06/02/atandt-makes-sweeping-changes-to-data-plans-iphone-tethering-comi/). The million dollar question is “will users suffer”. And happily for Better Broadband the answer looks to be no.  “Based on current usage patterns, 97% of O2 smart phone customers would not need to buy additional data allowances. And according to the network the lowest limit of 500MB is 2.5 times the amount used by average customers on a monthly basis.” (source: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/bargains-and-rip-offs/broadband-and-phones/article.html?in_article_id=506082&in_page_id=182&ito=1565)

If service providers can continue to offer fair packages that cover users needs (and then some) consumers can, and no doubt will, continue to embrace the variety of new and exciting things they can do with the mobile Internet.

How much data are you using? This really puts into digestible terms what you can do with a 500MB plan.

*Source: http://www.thisismoney.co.uk/bargains-and-rip-offs/broadband-and-phones/article.html?in_article_id=506082&in_page_id=182&ito=1565

The most popular island app was web browsing at 43% followed by email at 32%. Twitter and Facebook came in at 5% each and a bunch of you picked “other” which primarily broke-out into the websites for your favorite airline

I guess the results shouldn’t surprise – the vast majority consider the basic applications as the must- haves. We can all wait until we get home to resume gaming and watching movies.

This theme was also echoed at the Light/Heavy Reading panel in which our CTO, Don Bowman, participated in titled “Policy, DPI & Net Neutrality: Heaven or Hell”.  The general consensus by the panelists was that the definition of reasonable and transparent network management, although ambiguous, did provide service providers the latitude necessary to manage their networks for optimal subscriber experience and to move ahead with their plans. 

More specifically, closer to home, there is a lot of buzz about how to optimize mobile traffic to improve the subscriber quality of experience.  This is in the form of advanced techniques for delivering video since video is the “killer app” in mobile, just as it is on the fixed side.  Service providers want video on their network but need to ensure good quality – Sandvine solutions can easily interoperate with such specialized applications for traffic optimization.  Implementing network efficiencies, either at the edge with 4G technologies or in the core, is one of the 4 prongs that AT&T Mobility CEO Ralph de la Vega advocated in Tuesday’s CTIA keynote to spur mobile growth, the other 3 being releasing more spectrum, leveraging compatible technologies (Wifi, Femtocells), and optimizing applications for delivery over the air.  It’s exciting to be part of this mobile Internet explosion!

So what does this mean for mobile operators? We believe that as more and more applications are offered on mobile devices, operators are looking to predict usage patterns so they can offer personalized service tiers that increase customer satisfaction, and to build out their networks to match user demand. AT&T recently stated that “5 percent of users account for approximately half of the data traffic on average” so clearly flat-rate billing does not align with subscriber usage (see Fierce Wireless: Mobile data traffic patterns look similar to fixed broadband patterns).

And for subscribers? Hopefully it means more and more applications along with appropriate service tiers that economically keep our lives connected to the Internet, everywhere.

Some of the high-level findings of Sandvine’s report include interesting observations like social networking accounting for up to 9% of total bytes on any given mobile network and YouTube accounting for 10 to 15 percent of total bytes on any given mobile network. To download the full report visit http://www.sandvine.com/news/global_broadband_trends.asp.

Tara and I discussed the concept of “better broadband” and what that means for subscribers, operators and the network overall.

To view the article visit:

http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/billing-better-broadband.html