13 ms·
Pokémon Go data usage draws attention of House Energy and Commerce Committee [pdf]
- Zikes 10y agoIf Pokemon Go results in legislation mandating reasonable rates for mobile data I will buy a Wii U and several shares of Nintendo stock.
- jaggederest 10y agoNo, they're going to punish Niantic for using so much data, not make rates reasonable. Remember, the shareholders in US Senators are the large businesses.
- djent 10y agoI've been playing Pokemon Go since the day of release, and my cellular settings report the app has only used 230MB of data out of my 5GB per month. I'm not too concerned about data usage - I'd rather Niantic cache more to reduce load on servers.
- revelation 10y agoI'm curious they seem to have so many problems, given that at it's heart the game is rather .. decentralized. They have access to this vast swath of cloud technology and a few Moores law iterations to boot yet they seem to perform worse than even WoW did on launch, with a game that is extremely forgiving to latency.
- dom96 10y agoIndeed. In addition to this their outages have, over the past few days, been very predictable. There is one happening right now [1], and one happened at the same time yesterday and the day before. As far as I can tell that should make it easy to decide when they should deploy new servers to handle load better. 1 - https://pokemongostatus.org https://pokemongostatus.org
- TeMPOraL 10y agoYup. The load usually starts to happen when kids leave school, and then the servers blow up when adults leave work. Until this week, the game literally stopped working for me every day at 17:00.
- simcop2387 10y agoEverything I've seen based on previous outages, and rumours, seems to indicate it's probably a player data/authentication problem rather than the parts that are easily distributed (pokemon generation, image serving for pokestops, etc.). During a number of outages you'd be able to keep playing for a time iff you were already online and playing, at least according to some reports. I'd love to see actual postmortems from them but I doubt we will since they've said nothing at all so far. But the authentication could easily be a problem that they're using both their own service and google for providing authentication. Since they go down each time a new region is released it would make sense that they're getting hit with lots of account creation and google API hits, the things that are likely to be the worst for scaling, since google will rate limit most clients (though I'd think they could get something worked out since it's all real traffic). Along with that, their own authentication server has gone down near release (pokemon trainer accounts) while the google one was working, so they probably have had to throw servers at that and weren't expecting to. I'd also expect a lot of the load to be related to doing lots of geospatial queries, but I doubt they planned that badly since they had experience with ingress. I think it'd be related to the nearby pokemon feature that they've had broken since shortly after launch. There's definitely questions (e.g. why did nearby pokemon break the way it has?) about the particular bugs that people see that make me wonder how they've handled things but i suspect we'll never know since the answers are going to whatever secret sauce they've done to handle this kind of game.
- regularfry 10y ago1. They reused architecture (and possibly infrastructure) from an existing game, which has a different mechanic and different usage patterns. 2. It's massively more popular than they originally anticipated.
- lettergram 10y agoI agree, my browser is still in the #1 spot for data usage. I'd consider myself a power user, but still I've had Pokemon Go open a lot (an am level 23) so it's pretty interesting that more data isn't being used.
- bsder 10y ago> I'd rather Niantic cache more to reduce load on servers. While it is always possible that they just massively suck at infrastructure, I suspect that cheating is the issue preventing more caching. By keeping everything on their servers, the types of cheating you have to police are massively reduced. And people who play Pokemon will do ANYTHING to catch 'em all.
- Erwin 10y agoThe pokestop images don't appear to be cached -- they come up blank when touched even though you've been there a dozen times before. There's a good chance players will click on the same pokestops again and again, so caching even just the last 50 one would be helpful.
- TrueDuality 10y agoThey keep their 3D models of individual Pokemon including their animations on a CDN and don't perform any caching on the models. I suspect these change infrequently enough that they could be built into the app itself and save a significant amount of data. Another user has already mentioned they don't attempt to cache image or textual information about Pokestops. Pokestops for most people are pretty recurring. This probably consume less information than the models but is also likely to be pretty static information.
- djent 10y ago>They keep their 3D models of individual Pokemon including their animations on a CDN and don't perform any caching on the models Could you provide a source for this? I did some Googling but could not find any information supporting this. I definitely agree on the Pokestop data, but I find it hard to believe that models and animations are not assets included in the app file.
- verroq 10y agoYou can't find any info because it is completely false. As a Unity game all of the assets are stored in the asset bundle. The game contains ~60mb of assets. The only data the game fetches are the realtime map data and even those are cached internally.
- ticviking 10y agoI now wonder if the "server issues" are more an overloaded local cell network.
- xanderstrike 10y agoIt definitely is in some places. I was unable to log in at the Santa Monica pier on Saturday night with T-Mobile, but those in my party with Verizon were unaffected.
- Consultant32452 10y agoI tend to have the opposite problem. Any public places with wifi like malls and such are completely overloaded. It's not perfect, but I do much better on my cellular data.
- theseatoms 10y agoTip: Download an Offline Area in your Google Maps settings for your local region.
- callumjones 10y agoI don't think this works on iOS as each app is siloed but is this something that would work on Android?
- cheeze 10y agoDebunked as false. Source was somebody who works in the Google Maps org.
- byandyphillips 10y agoThe real question is, why aren't the mobile carriers giving us more data? 5GB per month seems unreasonable for a $100 mobile plan.
- lettergram 10y agoFor $125/month I have 4 family members on an "unlimited data" plan from T-Mobile (really that's 13Gb regular data, unlimited Netflix and other streaming). I did buy all the phones outright though, which was $2200 upfront.
- MrJagil 10y agoFor less than 20$ i get 40GB here in Denmark EDIT: this one https://www.oister.dk/mobilabonnement/taletidsabonnementer/oister-fritale-20gb/ https://www.oister.dk/mobilabonnement/taletidsabonnementer/o... and then I took advantage of a "double your data" offering they had. It's 120DKK for 20GB, usually.
- sleepychu 10y agoFor 20$ I get unlimited everything in the UK
- alexdumitru 10y agoMost likely your speed will decrease to something like 128kbps after a cap.
- onion2k 10y agoThat's true on every network except Three. Unlimited data on Three genuinely does mean unlimited without any restrictions (well, one actually, data used tethering your phone as a wifi hotspot isn't included). You could download a terabyte of stuff for £20/month (about $25).
- danielsamuels 10y ago
- lettergram 10y agoI feel like this isn't really the House Energy and Commerce Committee's job... Like, people choose their plan(s) and should be able to be responsible for themselves.
- malcolmgreaves 10y agoExactly. They have absolutely no reason to even give this a moment's consideration. This letter is an example of the US government overreaching its powers and meddling with an organization that's doing nothing wrong.
- jeremy_wiebe 10y agoWhat would make more sense to me is that the mobile OS vendors take on some initiative to accurately report data usage for a bulling period and warn when nearing the cap.
- mikeevans 10y agoAndroid has this built into the OS already. It will even turn off cellular data once a cap has been hit.
- lettergram 10y agoThat is by default set to 1.5 GB, but you can change it or even turn it off. I have unlimited, but still have a warning set at 3Gb
- ajmurmann 10y agoThat's the user's fault then.
- xntrk 10y agoeither overreaching or possibly doing some work for lobbyists for the telecoms?
- 0xdeadbeefbabe 10y ago> recent reports suggest that playing Pokemon Go could exhaust a consumer's available monthly mobile data. Well, I'll be. Poor consumers. Ranking members Frank, Diana and Jan might be exhausting your tax dollars.
- BillTheCat 10y agoSome Senator's kid maxed out their data plan in a few days and now they're writing an angry customer service letter. I really hope the outcome is that cell companies are forced to get rid of caps but we all know how much money telecom companies donate to prevent this kind of regulation.
- vermontdevil 10y agoIt's the House so it'll be a Congressperson not Senator. Usually that's what these committees do - check on variety of issues that impact their voters back home. Sometimes it can be inane, sometimes not. But usually nothing will result from this as no bills will be proposed till after the election.
- chipsy 10y agoI think the potential for a game to provoke some new legislation is very real. The quantity of people changing their use of time, space and infrastructure so suddenly is unprecedented, and even if it fades over time, the chances of more like this one are high.
- stanmancan 10y agoThose questions seem a bit loaded; since when does a business have any responsibility to "make the customer whole" in the event they exceed their data cap? Yes, they could be more transparent about how much data is being used. Maybe display it in the settings somewhere. However, I can't see how a customer being slapped with a large bill falls on anyone other than the customer. Does Google have a plan to make me whole when I watch too many youtube videos? Or Apple when I stream too much Apple Music? Instagram when it pre-loads movies as I scroll through the app?
- Waterluvian 10y agoDon't you get a breakdown of what every app has used on Android? Why does the app need to repeat that?
- pkaeding 10y agoYes, and I believe iOS gives the same breakdown (though it is not as intuitive to read, and it gives all-time-since-you-reset-the-counter data usage totals).
- SoreGums 10y agoThe default android counter is lacking, however there are quite a few in the Play store and Facebook actually promotes one inside their app. Being an AUstralian 4G consumer, not using a data usage monitoring app is a recipe for "having a bad day". This is a customer problem, govt needs to ignore people being stupid. If a customer buys 200mb of data and doesn't know what/how much that is the customer needs to educate themselves. The telcos here even provide usage meters in their apps and update within minutes most of the time. Even in Vietnam I can send a txt to 888 with the phrase "data" and it tells me how much data is left. Niantic need to be completely dismissive of this whole data usage situation... Is the government going to send a letter about battery usage next because the average play time is higher than other app usage and when the user moves away from the house where the power cord is the user might not realise that the battery is going down faster?
- loup-vaillant 10y ago
- nilved 10y agoThis is what the term "nanny state" was invented for, right? Why is your data usage the govt's, Niantic's, or a telco's responsibility?
- troebr 10y agoThis is the state making sure that uninformed customers are not taken by surprise by a gigantic data bill. Sounds like the state trying to protect its citizens. They're not bullying Niantic, just raising a concern. If anything this could prevent backlash from users against Niantic. To me it looks like these people are doing their job.
- nilved 10y agoThe onus is on the uninformed customers to inform themselves.
- wonnage 10y agoWhat if you're the lowest common denominator?
- supercheetah 10y agoNiantic is free to ignore this letter. Stifling would be if laws were passed on how Pokemon Go could be played. This isn't that. That said, these questions should be posed to the carriers rather than Niantic.
- it_learnses 10y agoyes, let's get rid of the FDA too. The Onus is on customers to inform themselves of the quality and origin of their food. Buyer Beware baby!
- nilved 10y agoI am glad we're in agreement.
- ultramancool 10y agoPokemon Go is fairly low data usage, 10-20 MB per hour of play (which this document lists) is nothing compared to the hundreds of megabytes you can blow in 10-20 minutes streaming video. Few other apps go out of their way to make similar warnings, instead they rely on the OS to do this for you, Android at least allows you to set both a warning and a stop point for your data consumption very easily. Many mobile providers prevent surprises to their customers by sending a text at 50%, 75%, 90% and then stopping unless they reply at 100%.
- xanderstrike 10y agoAnd 10-20MB/hr is a massive overestimation. I've been playing virtually nonstop for a week and Android calculates its usage at 193MB...
- ultramancool 10y agoYeah, on the other hand I had a buggy weather app that managed to use 2 GB of data in a period of a few hours, while I wasn't even looking at it.
- nilved 10y agoIf you download Google Maps, this is probably even lower. I had maps downloaded before Pokemon Go came out, and my data usage is below 20 mb.
- nilved 10y agoIf you download Google Maps, this is probably even lower. I had maps downloaded before Pokemon Go came out, and my data usage is below 20 mb.
- dewiz 10y ago3 good things could come out of Pokemon Go and similar games/apps/trends: 1. smartphones will finally have decent batteries (e.g. lasting at least 1 day for the avg PokemonGo player, aka days/weeks for the rest of the world) 2. through healthy competition, carriers hopefully stop charging ridiculous amount of money for data 3. convergence of home wifi and carriers, i.e. you can use and share your home wifi within miles from your home </tooOptimistic>
- jsmthrowaway 10y ago> 1. smartphones will finally have decent batteries (e.g. lasting at least 1 day for the avg PokemonGo player, aka days/weeks for the rest of the world) This is blocked upon a breakthrough in battery technology, not any (in)action on the part of handset manufacturers as you are lightly implying. Drones are more my wheelhouse but phones and automobiles are similar; we've reached roughly the top end of energy density with current known technology and chemistry. The fact that your phone can talk for several hours while operating multiple radios is already quite impressive given battery size, so I'm not sure why you classify phone batteries as anything but "decent." Pokémon Go isn't going to revolutionize our understanding of chemistry and physics, unfortunately. If you want a phone the size of an old brick you can have longer battery life, with the risk that a battery of that size will react very violently to being punctured or abused and swells frequently. Even current ones do. (You should see my drone's LiPos after I pull them out of a particularly demanding run [i.e., sport mode]; they're often hot to the touch and swelling, and this is somewhat expected depending on circumstances. Battery health is something you have to take seriously with drone batteries because they're surprisingly sensitive and don't have a long useful life. "Invent a better battery" is a meme among drone folks.)
- xanderstrike 10y agoThe answer is literally bigger batteries. I'd rather have a phone that lasts all day than one that's a millimeter thinner than it was last year. I carried around a 14oz 1" deep Cassiopeia Pocket PC in my pocket for years, a smartphone half that size would last days... so where is it?
- andybak 10y agoGosh. Do you still not have unlimited data plans in the US? love, Europe (EDIT - I was rather expecting downvotes for that glib post but there was a serious intent. You guys should be angry about your mobile and cable data situation. Very angry. It's pretty much the most expensive in any country I'm aware of. No doubt there are countries with a worse story on data charges but I've not been there)
- gleenn 10y agoWe did and then they took them away.
- goodplay 10y agoCapitalism and Free Market :)
- ben0x539 10y agoWe have those in Europe? I had no idea, sign me up!
- andybak 10y agoI'm in the UK and I'm paying £30/month for Unlimited 'everything' Data has a 'reasonable use' disclaimer but I've never triggered it. Tethering is treated differently and that does have a tougher limit but I've made my peace with that particular restriction. It only hurt me when my cable broadband became flakey and I got lazy and switched to tethering instead of fixing it. Turned out to be an OS problem.
- fweespeech 10y ago3 Democrats. :| But yeah, this is silly. People have to be responsible for their own choices after some point.
- morgante 10y agoGive me a break. This is yet another reminder that Serious People hate anything which is fun. If you're playing the game for hours of time, it of course uses data. Per minute, its data usage is actually rather minimal.
- puaI 10y agoThe only thing more infuriating than the fact that this letter was sent out...is that taxpayer money went to some incompetent person who couldn't be bothered to use a proper small-caps font.
- GauntletWizard 10y agoThe house should be asking questions. But it shouldn't be of Niantic; it should be of the carriers, who are treating a not-very-scare resource as if it were far more valuable than it is, thanks to their poor management of a government-granted monopoly.
- downandout 10y agoWas a similar inquiry conducted with Snapchat? I've read several stories of 4-figure data bills having been run up by teenagers addicted to the service, but have not read about Congressional investigations into that issue. This letter seems like a desperate attempt by its authors to ride the wave of publicity currently surrounding Pokemon Go - it's clickbait for Congresspeople.
- srj 10y agoI've been playing this game quite a bit (level 20) and my data usage is a mere 122MB since July 1. It ranks 4th among apps in my overall data usage.
- pkaeding 10y agoIsn't asking content-providers to subsidize the cost of data for the users of their app contrary to network neutrality (which all three of the representatives signing this letter voted in favor of)?
- khnd 10y agoi feel like they're trying to stay ahead by focusing sights on niantic before the public shows up at the telcos with pitchforks. lame overall.
- drbawb 10y agoI can get 30Mbit/s (3.75MB/s) to my handset and they're worried about _10-20MB per hour?_ The problem here isn't the data usage by Niantic: it's the carrier rate plans.
- smpetrey 10y agoThis right here is the crux of the issue. Rate plans are straight robbery.
- srtjstjsj 10y ago> 30Mbit/s sustained? burst capacity and total capacity are different.
- CydeWeys 10y agoObviously it varies wildly based on distance to nearest tower and how saturated the band is with other users. "Burst/sustained" doesn't even capture the main variables that would reduce his speed.
- protomyth 10y ago"A recent survey found that the average user spends 43 minutes on Pokémon Go per day, compared with 30 minutes on WhatsApp, 25 minutes on Instagram, and 22 minutes on Snapchat." How is this even a useful statement? I'm thinking that 22 minutes of video is going to be a lot more data than 43 minutes of playing a game. side note: I hope an irritated group of howling howler monkeys shadow every speech of any politician that distributes a PDF that cannot be selected from because its a friggin image file.
- NamTaf 10y agoNever mind the data usage, how about the House ENERGY committee focus on the woefully inefficient battery usage the app has? I mean, that directly impacts their area by way of forcing heaps of people to charge devices far more often.
- vortico 10y agoA 5W charger is negligible compared to other things like 1000W+ air conditioners. And you don't have to cool a house if you're outside playing Pokemon...
- Sektor 10y agoThese numbers are flat out wrong, there's no way that the game uses '10 to 20 megabytes of data per hour' jpmorgan must have fucked that up somehow. I can't be bothered typing out the whole url referenced in (5) but that's just wrong.
- CydeWeys 10y agoMaybe if you click on a LOT of PokeStops, and expand the description to see the larger photograph ... And anyway, even if it were true, 10 MB/hr is nothing. That's 100 hours of playing until you reach 1 GB, which is the lowest cap I've ever heard of. Randomly browsing reddit will eat up a lot more than 10 MB/s if you're clicking on image links. Hell, there are individual gfys that are larger than 10 MB.
- dforrestwilson 10y agoHave you tested it? The thrust of the JPM piece was that there was no meaningful impact to data usage.
- ramblenode 10y agoI don't pay anything for Pokemon Go but I pay way too much for self-righteous grandstanding from lawmakers.
- CognitiveLens 10y agoI know it's from big, scary government, but why would they ask a few yes/no questions without requiring any sort of detail? A high school newspaper could do a better investigation. Dear Congresspeople Pallone, DeGette, and Schakowsky, Thank you for reaching out to us. I hope this response reaches you before the August 9, 2016, deadline. 1. Yes 2. No 3. No 4. No Kind regards, Niantic.
- Kenji 10y agoState, this is none of your business! Focus on real issues! What are we, infants who cannot keep track of our data usage? What are the cell phone carriers, imbeciles who cannot maintain infrastructure at high loads? This is an example of how the state poisons harmless interactions between consenting parties by making up problems to grow and gain more legislative power.
- LargeCompanies 10y agoWhen are all the other GO apps going to be released? Mario Kart GO (ok that's a risky proposition) Super Smash Bros Go Zelda GO Silent Hill GO or Resident Evil GO Augmented reality after many years I think will change video games and how we play them. Virtually reality for me no thanks .. bulky and uncomfortable in it's current form. Now if you could wear sun like glasses in which augments reality (see & explore a new world via these lightweight sunglasses) that would be cool!
- peterkelly 10y agoIsn't monitoring of data usage of apps an OS-level issue/responsibility of the user or their parents? Why is it the fault of Niantic? Any game could easily use loads of data, and 10-20Mb/hour doesn't seem that much given what it does.
- arrty88 10y agoIs the app uploading pictures all day?
- Sylphine 10y agoA better question would be: Why US carriers have overpriced data plans and/or outdated infrastructure when my third world country provides me with better price/performance that makes the Americans look like they are being ripped off? 7$ per month assures me of download speed 300mb/s 100mb/s upload speed and unlimited traffic on fiber. Do you have better deals guys?
- dspillett 10y agoThere are three issues here that I can think of. First is the obvious one that your loaded question alludes to: a resistance to change because that costs so companies won't do it until it would give them a relatively easy advantage (that lasts more than a week) over their competitors. Second: creating new infrastructure can be a lot easier than upgrading. You don't have to worry about supporting existing devices and userbase. Third: In developing nations infrastructure projects like that are often in significant part funded by internal government funds and external aid rather than there being an expectation that commercial entities will foot the entire bill.
- nraynaud 10y agoI have completely secondary questions related to the politics of it: why is "democrats" in the URL, don't they de-politize the working groups? isn't the majority of the congress Republican? What about the "ranking member" in the signatures? wikipedia doesn't really explain what it means. On a side note, I'd like to add that this is an initiative from the legislative power, not the government, and that this is a discussion and not an enforcement. One of the big job of the legislative power is taking the pulse of the world to try to inform their voting on law matters. If I were libertarian, I would be really pleased to have a heads up before any law is moved in my field of activity, and knowing the move has been made after at least an enquiry has been made.
- deleted 10y ago[deleted]
- dforrestwilson 10y agoWow the report that I published was cited in the letter! Kinda cool! Two questions: 1. How did Congress get our note? 2. Why is Congress spending time doing this?
- vortico 10y agoIt seems the consensus here is that data plans from US cell providers are more expensive than they should be for their little amount of data. I'm curious what the technical constraints of allowing more data for consumers would be. If increasing everyone's data amount is free for providers, then what's stopping providers from getting in a battle for the largest data amount for a given fixed price? Since this isn't the case, there must be some actual cost/constraint for serving data ofer 3G/4G/LTE.