“Earlier this month, Comcast Xfinity, the nation’s largest cable and home-internet provider, expanded its 1.2 TB broadband cap to 12 additional cities. This comes after an expansion this past November to parts of the Northeast.”
Charter seeks FCC OK to impose data caps and charge fees to video services
“Charter Communications has asked federal regulators for permission to impose data caps on broadband users and to seek interconnection payments from large online video providers, starting next year.”
Verizon “Max” – aka Edge – Hint – Don’t do it
“An attempt to get customers off of Unlimited data with an upgrade. According to some leaked leaked information posted at Droid-Life, the Verizon Max plan is designed specifically to tempt unlimited data customers into Edge.”
Which apps will drain your battery and data plan? Verizon’s got a list!
SUMMARY:
Verizon is now reviewing iPhone and Android apps, but not based on how fun or useful they are. It’s concerned about the resources they consume, which means Facebook and many popular games get docked.Verizon Wireless may have shut down its own app store, but it’s not wiping its hands of app curation entirely. The carrier has started reviewing, rating and recommending Android and iPhone apps to its customers.
What’s interesting about Verizon’s approach is it isn’t making its recommendations based on how entertaining, useful or fun a particular app is. Instead a team of Verizon engineers is looking at each app’s impact on the phone’s battery life, its drain on a customer’s data plan and how loosely it plays with security and customer privacy.
Basically, Verizon is compiling a series of regularly updated recommendation lists. The first is a list of 20 apps available either for Android or iOS that Verizon claims deliver a “best in class” experience on smartphones and tablets. As you might expect, Verizon isn’t being entirely objective in its choices, but it never claimed to be. One of the apps is even Verizon’s own AppLuvr software, which recommends other apps based on what’s already installed on smartphones.
The second list applies a much more visible methodology, rating the top 25 free and top 25 paid apps in Google Play based on three criteria: security, battery consumption and data usage. The third set of reviews is essentially Verizon’s naughty list: 13 apps – all games – that will drain your battery or eat up your data plan at a rapid clip.
Verizon isn’t making any friends here among the game development shops. Enormously popular games like Halfbrick’s Fruit Ninja Free and OMGPOP’s Draw Something got bad marks because of their battery drain. Other apps like Facebook Messenger and eBay scored relatively high but were penalized because of their high data consumption.
That may come us a surprise to many users since Facebook and eBay wouldn’t appear to consume that much data, especially compared to streaming multimedia apps like Pandora and Netflix, which received the highest possible Verizon ratings. But what Verizon is likely highlighting here is the persistence of those two apps’ connections. While Facebook might consume only a tiny fraction of the data in a single hour than, say, a Netflix video stream, the social networking app is always running in the background – transmitting a constant stream of signaling traffic over the network and whittling away at your data plan.
Alcatel-Lucent recently analyzed the enormous impact Facebook has on mobile networks through that signaling traffic. On Nov. 15, the social networking giant updated its iOS and Android apps, precipitating a 60 percent boost in Facebook signal load on mobile networks, even though the number of new Facebook mobile users increased only 4 percent in the same time frame. Alcatel-Lucent now estimates that Facebook is responsible for more than 15 percent of all mobile signaling traffic and accounts for more than 20 percent of all network airtime.
Carriers have long implored developers to keep the constraints of mobile networks in mind and build more efficient apps. With these rankings Verizon could be upping that pressure, punishing developers who keep developing unnecessarily chatty software.
As you might expect, neither Facebook Messenger or the main Facebook app made Verizon’s list of “must have apps” (though eBay did). Verizon, however, named Facebook’s much more network-efficient Instagram photo-sharing app in its top 20. I doubt Facebook cares either way.
Any time a carrier produces a must-have list you should take it with a grain of salt, but I will give Verizon credit. It actually recommended Tango, an over-the-top voice, video and messaging app that competes directly with Verizon’s core voice and SMS services
via Which apps will drain your battery and data plan? Verizon’s got a list — Tech News and Analysis.
Twitter’s New Transparency Report: Governments Still Want Your Data
“All your Tweets are belong to us… with a court order. Twitter’s second transparency report reinforces what many already know: governments want online user data, and to yank select content from the Internet. Twitter’s first two transparency reports cover the entirety of 2012, so there’s not a deep historical record to mine for insight. Nonetheless, that year’s worth of data shows all types of government inquiry—information requests, removal requests, and copyright notices—either on the increase or holding relatively steady. Governments requested user information from Twitter some 1,009 times in the second half of 2012, up slightly from 849 requests in the first half of that year. Content-removal requests spiked from 6 in the first half of 2012 to 42 in the second. Meanwhile, copyright notices declined a bit, from 3378 in the first half of 2012 to 3268 in the second.” http://yro.slashdot.org/story/13/01/28/2027200/twitters-new-transparency-report-governments-still-want-your-data?utm_source=rss1.0moreanon&utm_medium=feed
Google pledges fight over government access to users’ email
WASHINGTON (Reuters) – Google will lobby Washington in 2013 to make it harder for law enforcement authorities to gain access to emails and other digital messages. In a blog post on Monday, linked to Data Privacy Day, Google’s chief legal officer, David Drummond, said the tech giant, in coalition with many other powerful tech companies, will try to convince Congress to update a 1986 privacy protection law. He cited data showing that government requests for Google’s user data increased more than 70 percent since 2009. In 2012, Google said, it received 16,407 requests for user data affecting 31,072 users or accounts, more than half of them accompanied by a subpoena. “We’re a law-abiding company, and we don’t want our services to be used in harmful ways. But it’s just as important that laws protect you against overly broad requests for your personal information,” Drummond said in the post. The U.S. Electronic Communications Privacy Act, passed in the early days of the Internet, does not require government investigators to have a search warrant when requesting access to old emails and messages that are stored online, providing less protection for them than, say, letters stored in a desk drawer or even messages saved on a computer’s hard drive. The current system also makes complex distinctions, many disputed in courts, between emails saved as drafts online, in transit, unopened or opened. Some of them are to be released with subpoenas, which have a lower threshold than search warrants as they often do not involve a judge. A warrant is generally approved by a judge if investigators have “probable cause” to believe that their search is likely to turn up information related to a crime. Google, Microsoft Corp, Yahoo and popular social media site Twitter – among others – have resisted turning over customer data. They have put in place policies, based on the constitutional protection from unreasonable searches, that require search warrants for access to content of private communications. Privacy activists say the outdated law should be reformed to extend the constitutional right to privacy online, but legislation limiting government requests will not face an easy road. Last year, Democratic Senator Patrick Leahy, who chairs the Senate Judiciary Committee, introduced a bill that would have updated the current law. It triggered a wave of concerns from the police and FBI that new restrictions would impede crime investigations and possibly endanger victims. “After three decades, it is essential that Congress update ECPA to ensure that this critical law keeps pace with new technologies and the way Americans use and store email today,” Leahy said in a statement on Monday. His privacy legislation died in Congress last year after his counterpart in the House of Representatives, House Judiciary Committee Chairman Bob Goodlatte, a Republican, drafted another version of that bill, which also tackled other issues but stripped out privacy reform language. Last year, Goodlatte said he was willing to consider the privacy law reform, but that the timeline then was too short for a “thorough examination.” Leahy has now included the change of privacy laws as one of his top priorities this year. http://news.yahoo.com/google-pledges-fight-over-government-access-users-email-234520748–sector.html
Explore a Google data center with Street View!
Now this is a Data Center!
Top 1% of Mobile Users Use Half of World’s Wireless Bandwidth
The world’s congested mobile airwaves are being divided in a lopsided manner, with 1 percent of consumers generating half of all traffic. The top 10 percent of users, meanwhile, are consuming 90 percent of wireless bandwidth.
Arieso, a company in Newbury, England, that advises mobile operators in Europe, the United States and Africa, documented the statistical gap when it tracked 1.1 million customers of a European mobile operator during a 24-hour period in November.
The gap between extreme users and the rest of the population is widening, according to Arieso. In 2009, the top 3 percent of heavy users generated 40 percent of network traffic. Now, Arieso said, these users pump out 70 percent of the traffic.
read more of this article via NYTimes.com.
Smartphone data usage jumps 89% in the U.S., Android users still biggest gluttons
How much data do you use on your smartphone? – http://pulse.me/s/fuuR
Verizon to offer family data plans; move to tiered data pricing for all customers this summer
This is not going to be good for consumers! What do you think? – http://pulsene.ws/1FogA
