The telecoms industry regulator has said that Android smartphones eat up more data than their Blackberry counterparts in a new user advisory to telecoms consumers in the country.
The Nigerian Communications Commission (NCC) the manufacturers of BlackBerry help users browsing with their Blackberry subscription to compress a webpage when a request to open it is made.
“RIM, the manufacturer of BlackBerry, utilises a special compression algorithm to serve users of Blackberry handsets who have subscribed for Blackberry internet service. Whenever such a subscriber browses the internet and opens a webpage, a request is sent via the handset’s browser requesting for the page to be downloaded to the phone. This request is channeled to RIM’s gateway in Canada, which fetches the webpage, compresses it and sends the compressed data back to the BlackBerry phone as a download”, the telecoms regulator said.
In contrast, Android phone users browsing requests are sent to the gateway of their respective network providers and such data are usually not compressed, thereby consuming more user data, according to NCC.
“On an Android phone, the request to open a webpage by telephone subscribers is sent to the gateway of the network operator which then processes the information and sends back the page to the Android phone as a download (the data is not compressed – thereby requiring more bandwidth)”, NCC said.
In effect, an Internet subscriber using an Android phone to open a webpage may be downloading 200KB of data, while a subscriber using a Blackberry opening the same webpage would be downloading 50KB due to the compression of data by RIM, the telecoms watchdog explained.
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