I was browsing a review of RIM's BlackBerry Torch over at Anandtech, and the editor brought up a point that I've been somewhat agreeing with for quite some time. Currently, data use on a consumer BlackBerry (or any device not running BES) is routed through the BlackBerry Internet Service tunnel. This makes sense for e-mail and BBM, but do we really need it for web browsing as well? The editor at Anandtech noticed the browser was noticeably slower. More specifically, the time to actually start rendering the page was much longer (due to waiting for BIS servers to fetch the page, compress it, and send it back to the device). They did notice a dramatic improvement compared to other devices when stuck on EDGE.
Given the speed of 3G cellular connections now, I'm curious on what other DHC members think about this. I personally don't see a reason why we need web browsing data sent via the BIS link. Not only does it slow things down, but if the BIS servers go down, it doesn't usually just affect one carrier. If web browsing traffic were handled by the carriers (as with any other device), then I think it could be a big improvement.
Thoughts?
(oops, guess I should have posted the review).
Given the speed of 3G cellular connections now, I'm curious on what other DHC members think about this. I personally don't see a reason why we need web browsing data sent via the BIS link. Not only does it slow things down, but if the BIS servers go down, it doesn't usually just affect one carrier. If web browsing traffic were handled by the carriers (as with any other device), then I think it could be a big improvement.
Thoughts?
(oops, guess I should have posted the review).