Verizon will publish an application programming interface that could allow mobile consumers to “turbocharge” the network bandwidth their smartphone apps use, presumably for a small additional fee.
“I think one of the things that you could do is guaranteed quality of service,” said Hugh Fletcher, associate director for technology in Verizon’s Product Development and Technology team.
“One of the things that we are right now is very democratic in terms of allocating spectrum and bandwidth to users. And just because you request a high quality of service doesn’t mean you’re gonna get it. [The network] will try to give it to you, but if there’s a lot of congestion, a lot of people using it, it won’t kick people off,” said Fletcher. Verizon API To Give Apps ‘Turbo’
The network optimization API will likely expose attributes like jitter, latency, bandwidth, and priority to app developers, Fletcher said.
Despite expected complaints from some network neutrality advocates, there is a reason such an API might provide clear value to end users. Some of you might be using 3G or 4G networks, using different air interfaces, to use interactive cloud applications. If you do that often enough, on many networks, you will have discovered the experience problem caused by latency.
Where older GPRS or EDGE data networks featured round-trip latencies in the 600 millisecond to 700 msec. range, LTE networks feature round-trip latencies in the 50 msec. range.
One of the important elements of a cloud-delivered application experience is latency performance, even though we most often think of “bandwidth” as being the key “experience” parameter.
Some might say the key benefits will be for gaming apps, but many of us can assure you that other interactive apps, even those not intrinsically dependent on “real time” protocols, can suffer from mobile latency. Latency issues