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Or it could just piggyback the existing connections that are taking place. It could run metrics against every attempted outgoing or incoming transfer. This would include mail checks, notifications, or any in-app data use. Sure, it wouldn't be "real time" if I pick up my phone "cold" but even just piggybacking on mail checks would make it work pretty well.

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Since we already know that the mail client doesn't kill the battery dead, we can guess it's not checking for mail very often.

Sure enough, google tells us the most frequent check possible is 15 minutes: https://discussions.apple.com/thread/1596018?start=0&tst...

You could use the entire network stack, sure, but that still isn't going to be very fast, since any app that uses the radio frequently is going to drain the battery, and users will complain, which mean such apps just don't exist.

You can settle for only getting an idea of how useful the network is once every 10 minutes, but then we're back at the problem of the "network quality" metric not actually meaning anything relevant.

This is a brilliant idea, perhaps even startup worthy. Integrating the quality monitoring into the TCP|UDP/IP stack wouldn't be that hard and shouldn't have too much battery impact.

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