Data Connection Monitoring – Day 2
11 September 2009
5 Comments
Ok, so that’s day 2 done. I’ve not been doing any streaming of music or video today and haven’t downloaded any apps either. I did do a little more web browsing than yesterday, but otherwise, it should have been a less bandwidth-heavy day.
NetSentry has the past 24 hours’ worth of data usage at 13 MB, split between 12MB from the WiFi connection and 1MB from 2G/3G. So, it’s fairly close to Day 1’s usage.
I’m not going to post every day from here on. I’ll continue to monitor the usage and I’ll post my conclusions next week at some point. Next week I’ll try and experiment with having the always on data connection turned off and see what sort of difference you can expect in the average usage.
I've just came across your blog from the androidforums site. I've just ordered a HTC Hero and have a quick question hopefully you can answer.
Also, sorry if you don't have a Hero, I had assumed from a few of your entries that this is the phone you use.
With the data connections, can you force the Hero (or Android phones) to always try to connect to wifi were possible before connecting to 3G for all the apps running in the background? (twitter/facebook/gmail)
PS Really pleased that someone has done a data usage for android phones. I am aware there was some issues initially as some apps forced themselves on to 3G networks, which was a pain in the wallet when abroad.
Could I also ask what/how many internet connected apps you have running on in the background? Do you close them when not using them?
Welcome to my blog.
I do have a Hero yes, and as far as I'm aware, the Hero will use the wi-fi connection first if one is available. The problem is, the wi-fi connection is dropped when the device goes in to standby unless you tell it not to (see http://thisandroidlife.blogspot.com/2009/09/htc-hero-tip-prevent-wi-fi-being-turned.html).
The HTC Hero should have built-in widgets for toggling data if you wanted to be absolutely certain. Put the mobile data toggle on one of your home screens and you can turn off and on the mobile data services just by tapping the toggle. Your wi-fi will stay connected and the phone will still function as a phone.
I tend not to have many internet connected apps running at a time as I use Advanced Task Killer to kill running apps frequently. The only apps that I'd say are running 24/7 for me are the Google sync'ing apps such as GMail and Google Calendar, etc.
Hi mrussell,
Thanks for having a quick look into your daily data usage. It looks like you could conceivably hit 450mb a month if you are using 15mb a day or so. Of course, this won't be an issue once people use your tip for preventing the wifi from being dropped.
I think a T-Mobile Hero is definitely preferable to the Samsung Galaxy in that case. The Sense UI looks great, especially now the speedier ROM is being released.
Hi Chris,
yes, it looks likely that I'll hit the 450MB mark. I've been listening to Last.fm this past couple of days on 3G too, so that will bring the average for the week up even more.
And, Robbie, I contacted HTC this morning to find out for certain if my assumption that the Hero will always use the wi-fi over 3G if a wi-fi connection is available was correct. Here's what they had to say-
"When the wifi is connected, it will indeed use the WiFi as the default connection and suspend the 3G connection, except for when it is in standby (for battery saving reasons).
however, there is no way to make it search for wifi before trying a connection. you still need to manually connect first. however, if you keep wifi on and scanning, whenever you come into range of a network that you have already connected to, it will automatically connect and stop the 3G."
Thanks for your response.
Glad to hear that there are widgets built in/downloadable for data management. Will be safer to have them on the phone rather the checking the Orange website every so often, just to be sure.
Being a bit social savvy I'm expecting to have twitter/facebook/gmail apps open quite a bit.
Pleased to hear that the Hero will auto connect to already set up wifi points.
Keep up the good work on the blog. Really enjoying all the info and especially the tips.
(The one problem about waiting for something new is I have to read up as much as I can before it even arrives. It's a bit like being a kid shaking Christmas presents and guessing what they were)
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