Nokia Siemens Networks, who supplies infrastructure equipment to operators around the world, but is sadly not the number one vendor, and Qualcomm, who makes chips that enable hardware manufacturers to make devices ranging from cheap feature phones to some of the most advanced smartphones on the planet, are teaming together to show the wireless industry that increasing a customer’s battery life is as easy as making sure you have the most up to date 3GPP Release 8 implementation up and running on your network. More specifically, there’s something called Cell_PCH that helps smartphones stop hogging network resources.
Here’s how it works. Remember how much heat AT&T got about their network and how they signed up to offer Apple’s iPhone without understanding the full effects that the huge amounts of data that will be eventually coming down their wireless pipes might have? Turns out that the data traffic was the least of their issues, instead it was how the iPhone was connecting to the network. Instead of making a connection to a cell tower and then maintaining it, thus leaving the radio on all the time and killing battery, the iPhone would disconnect as soon as it was done transferring information. When it needed more data, it would reconnect, then disconnect once it got what it wanted. This constant cycle of connecting and disconnecting causes what people call “signaling” issues and it can get so bad that other devices simply can’t connect to local cell towers.
Multiple vendors have come up with multiple ways to solve this, most famous of all is RIM who has their own servers in Canada and requires all traffic that eventually goes to BlackBerry users to pass through them first. With 3GPP Release 8 however, think of it like 802.11n, meaning an updated standard on an otherwise old (GSM) technology, Cell_PCH is built in and offers the ability for devices to maintain a constant connection with networks while using hardly any battery. Now it’s just up to smartphone makers and operators to make sure their devices conform to the updated standard.