Having just spent the best part of a week in a field in Somerset, England, with 150,000 like-minded music fans (at the Glastonbury Festival – but that’s another story), I had time to consider the limits of the internet and mobile information in general, and where we may be heading.
As an iPhone owner, I decided to take mine along and see how I got on. I didn’t actually desperately want to use it (I’m not that much of a Twitterer/blogger that I couldn’t envisage a few days without doing so) but I thought checking work email would be nice.
Why are roaming charges so excessive?
The first problem was that I live in Spain. As soon as I switched on after touchdown in the UK, I was informed of “excessive” data charges were I to actually enable any internet at all.
The reason why operators charge you “roaming” when you’re on the same network (as is often the case after recent consolidation in the industry) just because you’ve gone from one country to another is, of course, a no-brainer – they’re doing it to take your money, nothing else.
But to me, operators have to become truly global if data use is to expand exponentially, as I’m sure all in the industry hope it will in the next 10 years. It’s happening for talk in Europe through EU directives – it has to happen for data too.
That was enough – off it stayed. But my wife has a work SIM card, so when we wanted to catch up on our progress as we crawled along the 12-hour queue to enter the festival, we popped that in my iPhone instead to get some internet news.
The internet is too slow over 2G
Next problem – 2G. Some pages just wouldn’t load. Others (all in fact) took 2 minutes or more. Conclusion? If you want mobile internet, use 3G. The 2G iPhone is great in a wifi spot, say at home. Facebook catch-up in bed? Wonderful. Email on the toilet? We’ve all done it. (No? Just me? Mmmm.)
But mobile internet without 3G? Forget it. My experience was depressingly reminiscent of when I took my first Psion on holiday in Cyprus 10 years ago to try and use email via the infrared port on my old Sony-Ericsson mobile. Rubbish. Of course all phones are 3G nowadays, but why the 1st-gen iPhones weren’t remains a mystery to me.
Smartphone battery life: The power to perform?
I bought a combined phone/car/mains charger with attachments to fit basically all mobile devices and electricity supplies for £40 – got it at the services on the way down. It was great, if pricey. I just charged the phone from the cigarette lighter in our camper van when I needed to. So for me, this was not an issue.
There were many stalls selling portable battery chargers – they didn’t seem to be doing much business though, which is not too surprising at £10 or £15 for a few charges. There was also an Orange (as in the network operator) bar that would charge your phone for free, although you had to sit and wait for it. The usual expensive drinks were on sale, of course. There was always a queue.
As I was following the build-up to the festival on Twitter, someone said they’d bought an old-model Nokia for £15 on eBay to use while they were at the festival. The phone in question had a huge battery life, which they calculated would easily last a full five days. They’d concluded that phone calls to mates were the number one priority, not the internet.
We need ways to save power
But what really needs to happen is that today’s devices need to use less power once again. With big colour screens and the like, instead they are using more. Why can’t mobiles have kinetic devices in them, like the one that powers my watch as I walk? Why can’t every mobile have a solar cell on it? Mobiles live in pockets – isn’t there something that can harness heat to trickle charge them for extended life?
I don’t know the answers, but I can make a pretty sure guess that in the next 10 years, some combination of these types of solution plus lower-consumption hardware will mean that power consumption for smartphones starts falling again.
The phone is just part of the problem
And what of the power needed to get tweets, web pages, emails and the like into the devices in the first place? With Google already a devastating user of electricity globally, and trying innovative solutions like offshore wave-powered data centres to feed its information-hungry clientele, issues are raised as to how practical the growing thirst for information is, and how systems will keep up without ravaging our planet.
I suspect that these broader power issues will become the most dominant of all the above. We need to decide how much we’re prepared to spend in resources (both our own and the world’s) as the bandwidth to power our growing information hunger broadens and broadens.
Meanwhile for me, due to my slightly older phone and to being abroad, the web-on-holiday thing still wasn’t good. Just as well there were other things to do to keep my mind off the web while I was there…
By Phil Morse