BlackBerry addicts haven't put a toll on The Network, but the Motorola Droid is consuming data the iPhone way. Verizon Wireless says they're ready.
The Motorola Droid has become a hit on Verizon Wireless, and the Android Browser is rapidly climbing on the popularity rank. In an interview with BusinessWeek, Verizon Wireless' CTO, Anthony Melone, says the carrier has made upgrades that would handle extra data traffic.
The Network is also said to be able to handle the extra traffic a potential Apple iPhone for Verizon Wireless would bring. Obviously, it should be a given for any carrier to be able to handle large amounts of data traffic now that Qualcomm's Gobi technology appears on a range of mobility products.
Verizon Wireless recently also released a new data plan requirement for phones like the Samsung Rogue, meaning that the carrier won't exactly be unknown to the subject of data consumption, like AT&T Wireless might to some extent have been a couple of years ago.
Some have suggested that AT&T's network equipment isn't handling peaks efficiently, leading to network congestion. If you've ever worked in an environment with a shared network printer, you might have experienced network congestion in the most basic way when too many are trying to print simultaneously. If that's what plagues AT&T's network in some areas, it might be the HSUPA connection that causes all the trouble.
Ericsson earlier this year published a research paper on the subject, with the following conclusion for the proposal of introducing an HSUPA transport network flow control algorithm that handles congestion situations efficiently and supports Quality of Service differentiation:
With more and more increased air interface throughput, the efficient utilization of the often limiting transport network became more important. To meet this demand a per-flow HSUPA transport network flow control algorithm has been proposed. The need for transport network congestion control was shown and transport network congestion detection and avoidance techniques were described. The introduced algorithm can support quality of service differentiation among HSUPA flows as well as different transport network bottlenecks for the flows of the same Node B. It was shown by simulations that the proposed algorithm can maintain high transport network utilization and good fairness among the flows while also keeping the delay and loss in the transport network low. The solution has been compared to a scenario when we rely only on TCP congestion control and it has been shown that the lack of HSUPA flow control causes serious performance degradation in the system when the transport network capacity is limiting the throughput.
In English this means that until HSUPA networks get this proposed algorithm, there's only one way to solve the problem: Avoid network congestion altogether by expanding HSUPA network capacity, which is what AT&T is currently doing by deploying HSPA in the 850 MHz frequency. For T-Mobile customers it's worth noting that T-Mobile has quickly rolled out increased HSPA capacity on its own network, meaning that they are less likely to get into network congestion trouble during peak times.
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