Mika Raento on IP over 3G

I have been enjoying Mika Raento‘s works since his Symbian Hacks for Context-Aware Programming that helped me a great deal on some projects. Since then, Mika has been working (among other things) on Jaiku. As one of the top mobile ubiquitous application developer out there, Mika keeps track of his frustration on the technologies and platforms that do not deliver the expected quality. For example he has been highlighting the issues on building IP-based application on top of 3G/UMTS

3G/UMTS is nowhere near working! Moving around in central Helsinki, an E61 drops the network fully or switches between 2G and 3G (dropping TCP connections) every few minutes. Establishing calls may take 5 tries.

Moving outside central urban areas, an N80 will constantly try to connect to a 3G cell, fail, connect to a 2G cell, notice there’s a 3G cell available, try to connect, fail, repeat. The phone heats up and kills the battery in about an hour.

Sending a few packets of data every few minutes kills most phones’ battery in about 8–12 hours on 3G. The same amount of traffic per time unit on 2G (GPRS) allows 2–3 days of use.

So neither the network nor the GSM chipsets is up to the task yet. I think the people pining for 3G at the moment are not actually using it for anything real.

In a recent talk, he mentioned his problems of using TCP as part of a solution to provide Jabber fro Jaiku:

The trick, is that the “reliability’’ this documents talk about is quite different with what we tend to think of as reliable. TCP’s reliability means in-order delivery and integrity (no bits flipped). What people often think when they think of reliable is some vague idea of “data getting to the other end’’. Which of course isn’t the case.

Relation to my thesis: Mika provides a timely down to the ground really check on the development of mobile, context-aware applications. Yes ubicomp is here, but it often gets down to the science of “bricolage”?