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.

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

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.

Early talk about IPTV positioned the technology as the telco’s secret weapon for entry into a space cable operators have forever dominated.   Now, cable operators themselves are looking towards Internet based television as an avenue for lucrative service offerings with many analysts and industry experts touting it as the next big thing in cable.  Helping cultivate this push, equipment vendor Cisco Systems announced in late 2009 Cisco Blue, an interactive guide for cable-based IPTV set top boxes based on a Web-browser where widgets pull data from various sources such as Yahoo News or Twitter allowing subscribers to easily use their television to interact with the Internet.  In addition, Arris demonstrated how IPTV- over-DOCSIS 3.0 can deliver more than 50 percent in bandwidth savings over traditional RF QAM channels.

Now that video and audio streaming already constitute 27 percent of all global Internet traffic (based on Sandvine’s 2009 report analyzing over 20 million broadband subscribers) the need for a much smarter and efficient Web will become even more critical as potentially millions of new Internet- enabled sets plug in. Internet-based TV has a great potential to not only modify the way the Web is managed, but to turn market sectors such as advertising on its head just by the very nature that people will watch their shows and interact with others online.

Much like how IP voice communications was slow to take off, and at one time even scoffed at due to quality of experience issues as a result of jitter and latency, Internet-based TV has experienced the same slow start.  We are however at a tipping point where it is no longer a matter of “if” but “when” IPTV will surpass traditional television services – and that’s a story much more worthy of media buzz than the latest smart phone.

For example, as a result of being situated next to one of the world’s largest fresh water lakes, the city of Chicago offers an un-metered water service and flat-rate billing based upon the size of your house.

One would initially think that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing, but what happens, is that it leads to a tremendous waste of water. After living in the city for a while, Chicagoans tend to get lax on how they use Lake Michigan’s resources. Simple tasks like watering the lawn and not paying attention (or at times even caring) can lead people to water the sidewalk or city streets. Trust me, I lived there and did it from time to time (of course not on purpose) and I saw many of my neighbors do it.

This isn’t all that much different from the Internet — downloading large files and never using them or sending large attachments to everyone in your address book effectively wastes bandwidth that could be used by others.

I now live in the Sonoran Desert where water is a precious commodity and I pay for every drop I consume. Now that my monthly bill is tied directly to how much I use, I quickly take all the recommendations on how to consume less water; such as ensuring that I have no leaky faucets, minimizing or eliminating the grass (or sidewalks) I water and not washing the family car in the driveway.

Now of course this isn’t a perfect analogy as water has intrinsic value per liter and a packet does not. And water companies are less concerned about peak usage as they have the ability to store reservoirs of water to tap into during peak hours. But I think the analogy is close enough to make the point that people should be made aware of their consumption of network bandwidth so as not to waste it like many of my former neighbors did with their water in Chicago.

At the end of the day, bandwidth is a limited network resource. If there is any way we can make consumers aware of how they are using their bandwidth to ensure they are not wasting it, it would greatly help everyone’s quality of service when using their Internet service. Usage-based billing is one of the most effective ways service providers can manage the costs of building out their networks while at the same time making users aware of their usage.

Even though you can hazard a guess when you’ve walked a mile or poured a pint, there’s definitely something abstract about downloading a gig for most people. Take the case of a man who was billed $66,000 dollars by his service provider for downloading what amounted to three movies?  “I would leave my PC on all night, believing that all traffic was included,” he noted. Clearly this guy thought he was on an “all you can eat” bandwidth plan when it actually included 600 megabytes per month and every additional kilobyte cost another 2 cents. Sure this is an extremely rare and sensationalized case but brings up a valid question – where do we draw the line on assuming we are dealing with informed consumers when it comes to broadband?  Should the average consumer need to understand the difference between a kilobyte and a gigabyte?

The fact is that most folks understand the quality of their broadband experience in a very application specific way.  Quality is not about bits and bytes, it’s about clear phone calls, lively online gaming, sharp video and yes, speedy downloads.  There’s an excellent opportunity for broadband providers to communicate the value of their monthly package tiers by breaking them down into easily digestible measurements in language everyone can understand. For example: a 100-gigabyte data tier would be suitable for subscribers that send out 20 million e-mails, or upload 10,000 photos or download 50 movies or 25,000 songs. Amazing what 100-gigabytes offers!

In the end, most consumers will be most satisfied when their service provider sends them a monthly bill that helps them understand their individual online usage patterns and gives them the opportunity to move to the plan that best meets their needs.   Most of us can look to the voice plans we have for our mobile phone to know that its not all that far fetched of a dream.