AT&T Capping Data Plans – Bugs to Follow
If you live in the United States and own and iPhone, chances are you’re aware that AT&T has some reliability issues. As the sole mobile service provider for iPhones in the US, AT&T has seen their usage skyrocket and their reliability crumble in the past few years. Everyone has an opinion about why, but as of today AT&T has revealed what they see as one big problem: heavy bandwidth usage.
Starting this month, AT&T will now limit the amount of data an iPhone or iPad may consume in a given month. The caps start at 200MB, but for an additional fee you can have all the way up to 2GB. Existing users will continue to have an unlimited data plan for now, but new contracts will not have that option going forward.
AT&T says that 98% of their customers use less than 2GB of data per month, which means that most people won’t hit the top usage cap. However, many people will still opt for the lower 200MB data cap because it will actually be cheaper than their current unlimited iPhone data plan. That means software developers have an interesting new challenge on their hands – bandwidth optimization.
Americans, and American developers, have taken for granted that the iPhone can consume data freely without limit. The only reason that an app can’t be too chatty over the network is that mobile data transfers are still incredibly slow compared to regular broadband.
Still, many people will now demand their apps be even more data thrifty. That means software testers have a new testing question to consider – how data hungry is an app? Just as memory leaks indicate a lack of diligence around memory management, “data leaks” can indicate that an app sends or receives more data than necessary. Here are some reasons why:
- Not using compression when possible
- Designing chatty API protocols
- Sending large data components multiple times when only once is necessary
- Sending data for processing within an app rather than processing it on the server
- Not using caching
This makes me want to go dust off my old 14.4kbps modem and remember what slow Internet used to be like. What other ideas have I missed?
