Researchers at UCLA say U.S. mobile operators are potentially charging customers for data those customers never receive. A PhD candidate and her team studied the networks of two unnamed carriers and found that Android phones are likely to incur charges for data that never actually reaches the devices.
When a cellular network streams video or audio to a smartphone, the device typically cannot tell the network the data has been received. So if a user starts watching a movie and then loses his connection, the network may continue to deliver the video and charge the customer. UCLA’s Chunyi Peng found that this was just what was happening when she compared carrier data logs to the data actually received by the Android smartphones in her study. Her research team racked up charges for 450 megabytes of data that they never received.
Peng’s group also found a way for subscribers to download some data without paying for it. The group developed an app that asks the network for data by sending DNS requests. A DNS is the numerical address of a website, and Peng says she was able to download 200 megabytes of free data by sending DNS requests to the networks.
Peng declined to name the two networks she studied, but did say that together they have half of US subscribers. That suggests that the two were probably Verizon Wireless and Sprint, which together have roughly 150 million total subscribers.
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