Is Siri a data hog? New study finds iPhone data usage soaring.

iPhone 4S data rates are soaring, and Siri, the new voice-controlled personal assistant from Apple, could be responsible. 

|
Reuters
Siri, shown here on an iPhone 4S, is helping to drive up data usage, according to a new report.

The iPhone 4S is burning through twice as much data as the iPhone 4, and almost three times as much data as the iPhone 3G, according to a new study from tech management firm Arieso. And in an highly-cited interview with Bloomberg, Michael Flanagan, the author of the study, is blaming much of the spike on Siri, the voice-controlled personal assistant introduced on the iPhone 4S. 

"Voice is the ultimate human interface," Flanagan told Bloomberg. 

According to Arieso, iPhone 4S users are the "hungriest" data consumers in the world – but users of other smartphones, including handsets driven by the Android OS, aren't far behind. All that data usage could be bad news for carriers and consumers, Arieso warns.

"The introduction of increasingly sophisticated devices, coupled with growing consumer demand, is creating unrelenting pressure on mobile networks. The capacity crunch is still a very real threat for mobile operators, and it looks set to only get harder in 2012," writes study author Michael Flanagan. "The mobile industry needs new investment and new approaches to boost network performance and manage the customer experience." 

So is Siri really to blame for the spike in data usage? Well, over at The Next Web, Matthew Panzarino isn't so sure. In a long post, he advises readers to take the Arieso report with a grain of salt – especially as pertains to Siri's role in all that network traffic. 

"Remember that the iPhone 4 numbers that the iPhone 4S is being compared to are from 2010. That’s before Apple introduced its iCloud backup services at all, which can be hundreds of megabytes in size," Panzarino writes. "iTunes Match, Photo Stream, iMessage and all of the other data hungry iCloud services are likely a huge part of the increase from over a year ago... The entire smartphone using population uses more data now than in 2010, hands down." 

For more tech news, follow us on Twitter @venturenaut. And don’t forget to sign up for the weekly BizTech newsletter.

You've read  of  free articles. Subscribe to continue.
Real news can be honest, hopeful, credible, constructive.
What is the Monitor difference? Tackling the tough headlines – with humanity. Listening to sources – with respect. Seeing the story that others are missing by reporting what so often gets overlooked: the values that connect us. That’s Monitor reporting – news that changes how you see the world.

Dear Reader,

About a year ago, I happened upon this statement about the Monitor in the Harvard Business Review – under the charming heading of “do things that don’t interest you”:

“Many things that end up” being meaningful, writes social scientist Joseph Grenny, “have come from conference workshops, articles, or online videos that began as a chore and ended with an insight. My work in Kenya, for example, was heavily influenced by a Christian Science Monitor article I had forced myself to read 10 years earlier. Sometimes, we call things ‘boring’ simply because they lie outside the box we are currently in.”

If you were to come up with a punchline to a joke about the Monitor, that would probably be it. We’re seen as being global, fair, insightful, and perhaps a bit too earnest. We’re the bran muffin of journalism.

But you know what? We change lives. And I’m going to argue that we change lives precisely because we force open that too-small box that most human beings think they live in.

The Monitor is a peculiar little publication that’s hard for the world to figure out. We’re run by a church, but we’re not only for church members and we’re not about converting people. We’re known as being fair even as the world becomes as polarized as at any time since the newspaper’s founding in 1908.

We have a mission beyond circulation, we want to bridge divides. We’re about kicking down the door of thought everywhere and saying, “You are bigger and more capable than you realize. And we can prove it.”

If you’re looking for bran muffin journalism, you can subscribe to the Monitor for $15. You’ll get the Monitor Weekly magazine, the Monitor Daily email, and unlimited access to CSMonitor.com.

QR Code to Is Siri a data hog? New study finds iPhone data usage soaring.
Read this article in
https://www.csmonitor.com/Technology/Horizons/2012/0106/Is-Siri-a-data-hog-New-study-finds-iPhone-data-usage-soaring
QR Code to Subscription page
Start your subscription today
https://www.csmonitor.com/subscribe