Your Mobile Carrier Is Lying To You
By telling you mobile web pages are 77% smaller than they are
We know the extent to which mobile carriers indirectly benefit from the heavy hidden-autoplay-video-laden mobile web pages we’re constantly subjected to, but did you know they’re also actively lying to you about how bad it is?
I stumbled across this fact recently, and when I saw it was NOT confined to just one single carrier, I had to share it.
“It’s kind of crazy that we have to micromanage our data like this… are you supposed to check your data every day?”
Joe Ranft, Cinch (NY Times)
If you’ve tried to check your phone’s mobile data usage, you’ve probably run into issues like: delays in reporting (Verizon always has an 8–9 hour delay for me), non-specific/unintuitive classifications or categories, huge disclaimers like this one — which calls into question what the hell this information is (it gets worse, see below), and along with the delay, may make it useless (but we can’t know for sure).
It seems some of the mobile carrier billing infrastructure is old and creaky, so I figured (hoped!) perhaps mobile carriers would give their consumers tools to help them figure this stuff out ahead of time. In my quest for understanding, I headed over to the carriers’ websites. And…
Lies or Complete and Utter Cluelessness?
All the major carriers are lying to you (via their data calculators) about how much bandwidth mobile web pages use. We’d think they themselves are the best source of data on this issue, but ….
Mobile carriers think mobile web pages are between 0.17 and 0.92 megabytes in size. This wasn’t even true 6 years ago.
The industry-standard for webpage size is HTTParchive, which has been tracking it since late 2010. Their January 2016 average page size figure is 2,225Kb, or 2.17Mb (megabytes=1024 to a Kb). That means that T-Mobile overstated this figure by 57%, Sprint by 76%, Verizon 82% and US Cellular by 92%. The average web page today loads more in just fonts and stylesheets than US Cellular thinks constitutes a full page.
That’s 77% smaller than reality, on average. It would have to be back in 2010, for ANY of these carriers be close to a correct number, back then.
AT&T did a different kind of estimate based on the amount of time you spend on web pages in a month — which rate works out to be about 15 megabytes per hour. Our own tests routinely show many mobile web pages reaching 15–20 megabytes within a few minutes of activity (or 38Mb in under 3 minutes here!). A separate clue as to how crazy this number by AT&T is, is that Xfinity’s (not mobile, but web) data calculator estimates a data rate of 180Mb per hour.
Nobody is verifying the claims of the carriers
They continue to create hard-to-compare oddly-tiered mobile data plans. But WORSE THAN THAT is the incredible difficulty of figuring out how much data your phone could be burning through as you navigate the mobile web. Ironically, on a fast connection, you may not even notice the difference between a 10Mb hidden-video mobile web page and a 2Mb just-lots-of-images page. At least not until your mobile bill shows up.
While you’re trying to (X) out of that popup ad on your mobile phone, lots of unwanted stuff might be loading in the background without your knowledge.
We’re going to be publishing more of this type of data in the coming weeks at Optimal.com, so sign up for our notifications/beta list.
Here’s some further details on what I was looking at:
Example — my carrier: Verizon
I started with my own carrier and went to their Data Calculator page. I wanted to focus only on web pages, so set everything else to zero and selected “3000 pages per month”. Apparently this is going to use about 1Gb, or 1172Mb according to Verizon:
Working it out, Verizon is estimating the average web page to be about 400Kb as they also state elsewhere on the page (about 0.39Mb). I tweeted this out a few weeks ago and had someone respond to me (it seems they deleted the tweet afterwards since I can’t find it, though I obviously can’t say if what they said is true or not either) that they worked at Verizon and they’ve had the very same calculator, since at least 2008.
Here are the data calculators for your enjoyment
T-Mobile: http://www.t-mobile.com/Tools/MBCalculator.aspx
Sprint: http://www.sprint.com/landings/datacalculator/index.html
Verizon: http://www.verizonwireless.com/b2c/splash/dataShareCalculator.jsp
US Cellular: http://www.uscellular.com/data/data-estimator.html
