The Tale of the Android App that Crippled T-Mobile’s Network
Android apps can do a lot of things, and while you may have never expected one of them to be choking out T-Mobile’s network for an entire city, turns out that is exactly what happened. An FCC filing by TMo brings up the year old incident to draw attention to the sticky situation created when you mix net neutrality and mobile. In this case, an instant messaging app ate up so much bandwidth refreshing its network connection that when connected to a wireless network it had crippling effects. Grant Castle, director of national planning for T-Mobile, writes:
T-Mobile network service was temporarily degraded recently when an independent application developer released an Android-based instant messaging application that was designed to refresh its network connection with substantial frequency. The frequent refresh feature did not create problems during the testing the developer did via the WiFi to wireline broadband environment, but in the wireless environment, it caused severe overload in certain densely populated network nodes, because it massively increased signaling—especially once it became more popular and more T-Mobile users began downloading it to their smartphones. One study showed that network utilization of one device increased by 1,200 percent from this one application alone. These signaling problems not only caused network overload problems that affected all T-Mobile broadband users in the area; it also ended up forcing T-Mobile’s UMTS radio vendors to re-evaluate the architecture of their Radio Network Controllers to address this never-before-seen signaling issue. Ultimately, this was solved in the short term by reaching out to the developer directly to work out a means of better coding the application.
Of course, what TMo is getting at is the necessity for wireless providers to be able to throttle back data connections when a service running on a users handset such as the app in question starts hogging up more than its fair share with negative consequences to the rest of the network. In this case the situation was resolved through the developer and all was right, but interesting net neutrality questions are raised nonetheless. It’s a raging debate that I will leave up to you all.
[via Gizmodo]