Siri Impact: a Bandwidth HogSiri Impact: a Bandwidth Hog

Data-heavy applications and growing smartphone adoption will increase the pressure to make more spectrum available.

The user may see Siri, the voice recognition application on the iPhone 4S, as a great application. But Siri is a bandwidth hog and will put more pressure on the government to open more wireless spectrum. These are the conclusions of one New Times article and two Washington Post articles. All three articles are worth reading.

The New Times article, "Top 1% of Mobile Users Consume Half of World’s Bandwidth, and Gap Is Growing", points out that the top 10% of the world's mobile users consume 90% of the wireless bandwidth. The top 1% of the users are responsible for about half the mobile traffic.

The Times article refers to a survey by Arieso, a mobile network management company whose slogan is "See your network through your customer’s eyes." The company published a survey that found that 64% of heavy wireless users worked from a laptop, 33% used a smartphone and 3% used an iPad. The survey also found that, "iPhone 4S users are the 'hungriest' data consumers, demanding twice as much data as iPhone 4 users and three times as much as iPhone 3G users". Arieso's CTO, Michael Flanagan, determined that Apple's Siri is one of the reasons for the data volume growth.

The Times article states that only 13.2% of mobile phones currently are smartphones, but this percentage is growing fast; the percentage of smartphones is higher in the US, Britain and Germany, and in Finland and Sweden, about half of all mobiles are smartphones. The average Finnish data consumption is about 10 times that of the rest of Europe. Ericsson has reported that they expect mobile data volume to increase tenfold by 2016.

The Washington Post article, "Apple’s Voice Recognition Siri Doubles IPhone Data Volumes", concludes that this data volume situation puts pressure on network providers to obtain more wireless spectrum. The Post article stated that, "The iPhone 4S's regular connections with Apple's servers to synchronize applications including music lists may also contribute to the data load.... Operators have sought to limit their data tariffs to prevent heavy use as subscribers record high-definition video and images and browse the Internet and play music on their phones. Vodafone, the world's largest mobile-phone operator, has shifted toward consumption-based billing to protect its network capacity."

The problems Siri and forthcoming competitive applications pose are that their bandwidth consumption appears to be quantitatively unpredictable--except to say that we can anticipate significant data volume growth. As more users own the iPhone 4S and smartphone competitors add their own form of Siri, then the network providers will have to respond. One response is to add more wireless spectrum.

A second article at the Washington Post, "Siri and iPhone4S data use could push spectrum policy changes, analysts say," shows that the growth in data will probably push the FCC to award more spectrum. Without expansion, the three major US wireless providers will have to risk network congestion, dropping calls, and reducing the bandwidth offered, which will result in unhappy customers.

One possible outcome is that the providers charge by bandwidth as well as usage. The article concluded that the "threat of wireless capacity problems could help carriers and regulators in their quest to free up more spectrum while also deflecting consumer groups' concerns that tiered billing harms users".

There is nothing the end user can do to deal with this data volume problem except to voluntarily restrict their usage--which is not a likely scenario, especially for the 10% that consume the 90% of wireless bandwidth. The FCC will need to allocate more wireless spectrum. Network providers will look for spectrum owned by others and buy it. Providers may implement more Wi-Fi locations for access in congested areas like New York and San Francisco. Usage billing will probably become more prevalent. Throttling the bandwidth of heavy users, with ever-lower throttling thresholds, may also become common. The providers may even push for modified applications that reduce the data volume consumed. This could be sold as a way to reduce the data volume usage bill for the customer.

One thing seems certain: The appetite for mobile devices means there will be no stop to the data volume growth.