Vodafone denounces that up to 20% of mobile traffic is 'garbage' that is not consumed

Vodafone revealed yesterday that “up to 20% of the traffic flowing through a mobile base station may correspond to unrequested content (by customers) that no one uses or sees.” Vodafone refers to the so-called infinite scroll, which consists of the online content provider with short videos preventively sending unsolicited videos to users, so that they are preloaded.

As Vodafone notes, “Infinite scroll was designed to make web browsing more fluid by eliminating separate pages and allowing continuous scrolling of a web page. The feature has become ubiquitous in many short video apps that preload the following videos before the user scrolls down to view them. For Santiago Tenorio , Director of Network Architecture at Vodafone Group, “many online applications decide what the user should see next and, although it can improve the user experience by reducing waiting time, uncontrolled content preloading also has unintended consequences.” desired”, since many of those previously sent videos are not consumed. This means unnecessarily loading the network with content that is wasted and consequently increasing energy consumption.

Faced with these social media practices, Vodafone and the Broadcom group have designed a software tool – called Smart Connectivity API – that analyzes the level of network congestion in real time and allows content providers to adapt to the conditions of infrastructure, moderating shipping if there is congestion. The problem is that it is the content providers – that is, groups like Facebook or Tiktok – who should be willing to use the tool to moderate the emission of traffic and, for now, they have no incentive to do so.

This is precisely what the president of Telefónica, José María Álvarez-Pallete, was referring to this week when he pointed out at the MWC in Barcelona that “it is essential that we encourage technology companies to make responsible use of network capacity and energy consumption.” ” We need to motivate them to make responsible use of the network.”

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