DATA CONSUMPTIONION
ANDROID AND BLACKBERRY PHONES
The NCC as a regulator is responsible for
promotion of fair competition in the
communications industry and protection of
communications services and facilities providers from misuse of market power or anti-competitive and unfair practices by other service or facilities providers or equipment suppliers.
The issue of data usage on Blackberry and
Android smart phones has been generating a
lot of comments lately and the Commission has
a duty to protect and inform all stakeholders in
the industry on all issues of concern.
ANDROID AND BLACKBERRY PHONES
The NCC as a regulator is responsible for
promotion of fair competition in the
communications industry and protection of
communications services and facilities providers from misuse of market power or anti-competitive and unfair practices by other service or facilities providers or equipment suppliers.
The issue of data usage on Blackberry and
Android smart phones has been generating a
lot of comments lately and the Commission has
a duty to protect and inform all stakeholders in
the industry on all issues of concern.
RIM, the manufacturer of BlackBerry, utilizes a
special compression algorithm to serve users of
Blackberry handsets who have subscribed for
Blackberry internet service. Whenever such a
subscriber browses the internet and opens a
webpage, a request is sent via the handset's
browser requesting for the page to be
downloaded to the phone. This request is
channeled to RIM’s gateway in Canada, which
fetches the webpage, compresses it and sends
the compressed data back to the BlackBerry
phone as a download.
On an Android phone, the request to open a
webpage by telephone subscribers is sent to the gateway of the network operator which then
processes the information and sends back the
page to the Android phone as a download (the
data is not compressed - thereby requiring more bandwidth).
The amount of bandwidth uploaded is identical
between both Blackberry and Android phones,
the difference lies in the fact that most of what
subscribers do on their phones is to download
content which varies on both. BlackBerry is
indirectly subsidizing bandwidth by compressing the content downloaded by subscribers.
In effect, an internet subscriber using an
Android smartphone to open a webpage may be downloading 100KB of data, while a subscriber using a Blackberry opening the very same webpage would be downloading 25KB due to the compression of data by RIM.
Bandwidth in Nigeria is an expensive resource,
because most data is transferred wirelessly. This
is the reason why the NCC is promoting wired
infrastructure around the country through such
projects as WIN (Wire Nigeria) as well promoting
a Broadband Roadmap for the country which
will greatly reduce the cost of bandwidth
thereby reducing the cost of browsing the
internet on smartphones.
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