Location Apps to Respond to Data Plan Changes

Location Apps to Respond to Data Plan Changes
June 15, 2010
By: Janice Partyka
Wireless Pulse, June 2010

Unlimited mobile data plans have fueled the appetite for innovative
apps that continue to get more complex and demand greater bandwidth.
Long expected, AT&T no longer offers new smartphone buyers an
unlimited data plan and has moved to tiered pricing based on data
usage. The biggest bandwidth eaters include streaming video, video
down and uploads, and face-to-face video chats. But don=92t rest too
easy. Apps that constantly update the location of the handset have fat
bandwidth appetites.

Developers will be faced with pushback from users trying to avoid
bandwidth hungry apps. Rich Rudow of Trimble explains that, =93AT&T has
established pricing based on gigabytes and most consumers don=92t know
what a gigabyte is. They are metering usage in a way that consumers
don=92t understand. How does that relate to an app they normally use?=94

The industry needs to change the way it interfaces with the consumer,
says Rudow. Every app vendor can include a bandwidth counter that
shows consumption and, at the beginning of a big download, the user
can be presented with a suggestion to switch to Wi-Fi or an SD card.

For mapping and navigation, maps can be cached to lower data
transfers. According to Rudow, a typical street map fill for an iPhone
is about 10 kilobytes. For a topographic map, it increases to about 50
kilobytes for each smartphone screen, or what is called a map tile. If
you want a large geographic area where the user can pan around on the
screen, then the size of a bunch of street map tiles in a cluster can
be much larger =96 usually no more than 1 to 10 megabytes.

More: http://www.gpsworld.com/wireless/location-apps-respond-data-plan-chan=
ges-10071?print=3D1