Here's a bizarre report from a technically savvy friend who was in Dallas last week demonstrating his new mobile video application. His app makes good use of 3G data bandwidth, but will work over GPRS. Demos went well in the morning but attempting a demo at 2pm failed completely. The problem: no GPRS access. No connection at all, zip, zilch!
What's more interesting was the offhand remark by one of his prospects (all mobile experts who live and work in the Dallas area), "Oh yes, if voice traffic gets too heavy they knock down GPRS channels to provide more voice capacity."
And I thought mobile operators were looking for new data revenues. How naive.
It's a feature, not a bug. GPRS works by using idle marginal capacity in a GSM network. Voice calls always take priority and thus GPRS data gets dumped, like the bastard child it is.
Posted by: Zed | November 21, 2005 at 02:41 PM
Yes, there is a feature called pre-emptive packet data traffic channels (pre-emptive PDTCH) which are available for pkt data but get pre-empted for voice traffic when required. However, most operators assign at least a few fixed PDTCH channels so there is always some level of data service available.
Posted by: Brough | November 21, 2005 at 03:14 PM