iPhone Battery Life is AT&T's Biggest Problem

iPhone Battery Life is AT&T's Biggest Problem, NOT Data Usage

My contrarian indicators are now hinting its not the much publicized iPhone usage of video and data competing for access on cell phone towers thats causing capacity problems.  It's a signaling issue causing the majority of AT&T's network congestion issues for the iPhone.  iPhones and other smartphones are continuously pinging 3G networks and making constant queries of the network as they move among cellular sites to push email, access social networking tools and conduct other repetitive actions. For instance, an IM (instant messenger) user may send a message but then wait a couple of seconds between messages. In order to preserve battery life, the iPhone moves into idle mode. When the user pushes another message seconds later, the device has to set up a signaling path again.  Signaling traffic is out-pacing the growth of actual mobile data traffic by to 50%, if not higher.

The cell phone base station controller is spending a lot of its extra resources trying to process the signaling so it can't do other things like allocate additional resources for data. As a result you'll see dropped calls and data service degradation. Moreover, even when the signaling resource is released by the smartphone, the network can't react fast enough to allow for the next station to use resources until several seconds and sometimes minutes.  One of the ways iPhone and other smartphone vendors try to alleviate this problem and save battery life on their devices is by incorporating a fast dormancy feature.

Apple upset several operators last year when it implemented firmware 3.0 on the iPhone with a fast dormancy feature that prematurely requested a network release only to follow on with a request to connect back to the network or by a request to re-establish a connection with the network. Apple soon after released firmware 3.1, which removed the feature but spurred complaints among iPhone users when it came to battery life.  While fingers point at BlackBerry devices for also being signaling pigs, RIM argues that its devices don't have to wake up as often to query the network.

This is why carriers are continuing to look at a variety of solutions to reduce signaling traffic while preserving battery life including 3GPP which Nokia Siemens began selling this year at Mobile World Congress.  There are a number of other solutions operators can use to ease the congestion by offloading data traffic onto femtocells or Wifi hotspots and adding more network resources. HSPA+ (Evolved High-Speed Packet Access) that will enable the networks to reduce their transmission time from idle to active state and should help ease the congestion. Carriers can also monitor and control which devices and applications are generating excessive amounts of signaling or hogging more than their fair share of bandwidth. With this information, carriers can have increased awareness of the overall cost of delivering specific applications and services and can even map out their smartphone portfolios accordingly.

FCC Violates Our Trademark

 

The FCC recently launched an application to test mobile broadband speeds. FCC Consumer Broadband Test & Deadzone Report.  We would like to politely ask the FCC to stop using our trademark for a product that competes with our service Report Broadband Dead Zones.  Name it anything you want just don't use the term "dead zone" or "dead zones".

We are pursuing this matter through the press so we do not waste additional taxpayer dollars on lawyers that are not needed to resolve a simple issue.  Our request is similar to Verizon's violation of our trademark in 2008 using their Verizon 3G Dead Zones Commercial back in 2008 during the Super Bowl.  They kindly cooperated thanks to some helpful Verizon PR folks and the term has not been used in a commercial.

We request that the FCC name its' mobile measurement product anything other than Dead Zones, 3G Dead Zones, 4G Dead Zones, LTE Dead Zones, Dead Cell Zones, Broadband Dead Zones or Wi-Fi Dead Zones as we have worked very hard to build our brand and don't need the government stepping on our efforts.  It should not be too hard to change the name since this is the first day in use and this is your first notification.  There are plenty of other terms available to use that make the point such as Slow Connections, Poor Connections, Dropped calls, Dead Spots, Dead Patches, Dead Areas, and Poor Coverage would be terms that would be more appropriate and might be available without violating our trademark.

We have spent almost ten years building our brand and don't want it destroyed by big government and the lack of due diligence. The FCC has 1,900 employees and is supposed to act as an "independent agency" of the US government with an approximate budget of $466 million which is funded by $1 million in taxpayer appropriations and the rest in regulatory fees paid by the largest telecom companies in the US (AT&T, Verizon, T-Mobile, Sprint, Cox, Comcast, TimeWarner, CableVision, etc. It doesn't sound too independent when 99% of your revenue comes from the companies you are supposed to regulate.  $465 million of your dollars are funded by organizations that don't like our service because it exposes their bullshit coverage maps.

We have offered to donate our data for free to the FCC yet they can't take our dead data because of political pressure from their customer the wireless carrier.  This lack of administrative accountability on behalf of the taxpayer is ridiculous.

As a side note, if you think using the term "Broadband" is a loophole you are wrong.  The term refers to cell phone connectivity according to Wikipedia (broadband). Dead Zones can also refer to Ocean Dead Zones (Ecology) but this is clearly under different contexts and not in violation.

We also have an iPhone in the approval process and guess what it called "Dead Zones" using our trademark