Exploring the Durability of IP Connections from Android Devices | Hacker News Reader

Exploring the Durability of IP Connections from Android Devices

urbanairship.com

60 pointslyime10 comments

My samsung nexus s loses all radio connectivity (wifi and cell) dozens of times a day. i wonder if this is common, and why this phone is the second worst one in he report.

It's definitely the case for me too. I am using a T-Mobile MyTouch 4G.

There is something rotten with the cell phone networks in the USA because when I lived in Germany the situation was much better. Good to see my gut feeling being backed up by data. However, I thought the difference would be more than roughly 30%. Maybe the difference between T-Mobile USA and T-Mobile Germany is just bigger than the national averages of the two countries.

Don't compare that to T-Mobile in The Netherlands, the T-Mobile network there is absolutely the worst network I've had the displeasure of using. Dropped data all over the place, no signal all over the place. They really need to fix that issue.

You aren't the only one. Mine seems to suffer the same symptoms.

Potentially very interesting stuff, thx. If anyone plans to use this data to inform a purchasing choice, one note of caution: phones with higher utility that often connect via wifi will almost certainly show higher reconnect rates due to Android battery management idling the device in 3G mode and then switching back to wifi when in use.

Also, seems that using median rather than mean for this data might provide a better picture of the most likely outcome one could expect.

I'm surprised how few connections/day they report for the majority of clients. Just in a normal day, my phone is going to reconnect about 7 times, just switching between wifi and 3G, as I go to the office, lunch, and back home.

Great article, but why on earth do you use American Carrier-names on the phones? It makes no sense for ... the rest of the world. I'd be a very happy chap if every article about mobile phones would use the manufacture name!

What I'm wondering is why developers use Urban Airship's push service over Google's C2DM.

Having just done a C2DM implementation, the biggest factor would be that C2DM requires 2.2 or higher. I didn't fully explore how urban airship's helium works but they state support for 1.6 and higher. Beyond that, they also have a unified API to do push between iOS, Android and BBOS. We had already built out our own iOS push system, so the unified API wasn't an advantage. A bit more documentation from google on how to implement C2DM would have been nice, but there is enough out there to get it up an running.

(UA employee here)

Urban Airship also supports C2DM as a push transport for Android.

The Android library can operate in a hybrid mode where C2DM will be used if it's available, and will fall back to Helium otherwise.

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