BlackBerry most bandwidth efficient smartphone: Rysavy

James Etherington-Smith

James is journalist and sub-editor at MyBroadband, and editor at MyGaming. He is an avid gamer with an exceptional knowledge about gaming and related hardware...

Full Profile

E-mail

In a report examining the growing demand on mobile broadband capacity, Rysavy Research found that BlackBerry “consumes significantly less data in applications such as e-mail and Web browsing.”

According to Rysavy it is likely that pricing plans will move away from the current uncapped models used overseas to more usage-based models, such as the one introduced by AT&T with the launch of the iPhone 4.

South African consumers have never experienced uncapped mobile broadband and only began to taste uncapped Internet with the introduction of Mweb’s uncapped ADSL accounts earlier this year.

It’s easy to see how users benefit from more efficient bandwidth on their smartphones with usage-based price plans, but Rysavy says there is a tremendous benefit to operators as well.

More efficient use of bandwidth means lower network costs and a greater number of users supported in the same amount of spectrum.

Rysavy says that wireless networks inherently have far lower capacity than fixed line (or “wireline” networks). “One fiber optic cable has greater data capacity than the entire RF spectrum,” the report stated.

“A shared, inherently unreliable medium like radio simply cannot match what wire can bring,” the report added.

While Rysavy conceded that we’re not quite at a stage of capacity exhaustion, they’re seeing early instances of it. “Analysis shows that the available capacity can be consumed by a relatively small percentage of high-bandwidth subscribers,” the report said.

The report also warned that the spectrum of many wireless operators could be consumed within three to five years.

Rysavy said that it could take five years or more to bring any new spectrum online and enumerated a number of ways operators are addressing growing demand in light of this.

1.    Building new cell sites
2.    Spectrum reuse
3.    Offloading data onto other networks, such as Wi-Fi
4.    Femto cells

Increasing capacity is only part of the answer, Rysavy said. The other part is efficient use of spectrum. This is where BlackBerry comes in.

BlackBerry more bandwidth efficient

According to Rysavy, Research In Motion’s (RIM) just-in-time data, compression technologies and resilient proprietary protocols make BlackBerry devices more bandwidth efficient.

“Tests have shown BlackBerry to be significantly more efficient for mail and web browsing. These efficiencies translate to significantly lower costs for users and operators,” the report said.

RIM provides these compression techniques and proprietary protocols via intermediary servers (or proxy servers), known as BlackBerry Enterprise and BlackBerry Internet Servers.

To test BlackBerry’s email sending efficiency Rysavy sent a number of messages of varying lengths with different types of attachments. These tests results were first published in January 2009 according to Rysavy.

Four different devices then received the emails via Direct Push, with two Windows Mobile devices tested with and without Microsoft System Center Mobile Device Manager (SCMDM).

The configurations were as follows:
1.    Motorola Q9h
2.    Motorola Q9h with SCMDM
3.    HTC TyTN II
4.    HTC TyTN II with SCMDM
5.    iPhone 3G
6.    BlackBerry Bold 9000

The BlackBerry device used significantly less data to send the emails than the others except in the case of an email with an attachment described as “PDF full” (as opposed to “PDF text”).

In all other cases the BlackBerry also sent less data than the physical size of the email itself (8% – 67% of the original size), showing the effect of compression on the efficiency of the transmission.

Some of the other devices also showed compression in one to three of the emails received, but the BlackBerry significantly outperformed them every time.

According to Rysavy BlackBerry provides better web efficiency by compressing images based on a user-specified image quality setting.

Rysavy conducted tests that measured the number of bytes communicated to download popular mobile websites. They compared the BlackBerry Bold 9700 browser against Windows Mobile 6.5 Internet Explorer, Windows Mobile 6.5 with Opera, Android, iPhone 3G, iPhone 3GS, Nokia N97 and Samsung Jet.

The type or version of Opera browser also wasn’t specified. However, one can infer from the results that it was Opera Mobile with Opera Turbo turned off as there was no indication of compression.

It is also assumed that the default browsers for Android and the iPhones were used, though the specific version of Android wasn’t indicated.

Despite these potential quibbles the results were still meaningful. According to Rysavy, on average BlackBerry only uses a third of the data compared to the browsers on other platforms.

Opera’s web efficiency

While not mentioned in Rysavy’s report, Opera provides a similar service for web browsing through their Opera Mini and Mobile browsers on multiple platforms.

The browsers also don’t connect directly to web servers but go through Opera’s proxies which compresses the site contents and sends it to your phone in Opera’s own Opera Binary Markup Language (OBML).

Opera claims that Opera Mini is capable of compressing web pages by up to 90% with Opera Mobile capable of up to 80% compression when “Opera Turbo” is enabled

BlackBerry most bandwidth efficient smartphone: Rysavy << Comments and views