Siri – Ruining Your Cellphone Service By Consuming Huge Bandwith? Not Really!

A while ago, a research surfaced that since the launch of iPhone 4S, data consumption by users had hugely increased. Basing upon this research, an article was published in The Washington Post this week which said that Siri, Apple’s voice-based personal assistant, was responsible for consuming huge amounts of bandwidth. Peter Farhi, who wrote the article, said that Siri was flooding cellphone service’s with huge amounts of data and that his may soon result in the saturation of the bandwith. However, analysts have responded to this by saying that this claim is not substantiated and that Siri doesn’t make use of an extra-ordinary amount of data.

Analysts have responded quickly to this article by Peter Farhi. They are of the opinion that Siri does not at all consume large amounts of data. According to them, even if a user made heavy use of Sir, that would result in a monthly data consumption of less than 30 MB in a month, which is a very nominal usage. 30 MB is a very small amount  compared to the data consumption plans that are provided by carriers, AT & T’s most basic plan allowing a 3 GB per month.

The research which caused all this uproar claimed that iPhone 4S users were demanding twice the amount of data consume by iPhone 4 users. However, the research firm, Arieso, didn’t make it clear what methodology it used for the research. This is because a number of other factors can be responsible for this higher data consumption. With better functionality and more features, users may simply be using their iPhone 4S devices much more than they use their iPhone 4 devices. Moreover, Arieso didn’t explicitly state that Siri may be responsible for higher data consumption. This conclusion was automatically drawn by Peter Farhi in his article.

The original problem, as it is, is that with every new and advanced smartphone being released into the smartphone market, data consumptions rates per user are increasing. Samsung’s more recent smartphone users are consuming more data than the users of earlier smartphone models. This is a prevalent trend across the board and blaming it on Sir is a faulted analysis. However, the fact does remain that data consumption rate is increasingly at a rapid pace and carriers may have to do something about it to tackle it in the coming days.

Image courtesy planetc1.

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Salman

Salman Latif is a software engineer with a specific interest in social media, big data and real-world solutions using the two.Other than that, he is a bit of a gypsy. He also writes in his own blog. You can find him on Google+ and Twitter .

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