InTheCapital

By Charlie Warzel / @cwarzel

Apple has really been getting getting hammered lately in the press. The New York Times has written two meaty pieces on Apple as part of their iEconomy series, the last of which called into question the dangerous and borderline inhumane factory conditions at some of their mammoth factories in China. Bad PR for sure. Unfortunately for Apple, the hits keep on coming as the Washington Post released an op-ed yesterday skewering the iPhone 4S’s Siri, for crushing data at unprecedented rates and tying up cell networks across the country. According to an Arieso study, “the iPhone 4S demand[s] three times as much data as iPhone 3G users and twice as much as iPhone 4 users, who were identified as the most demanding in the 2010 study.”  

Here’s how the Post put it:

Siri’s dirty little secret is that she’s a bandwidth guzzler, the digital equivalent of a 10-miles-per-gallon Hummer H1.

Okay…so what? I mean if you want to use Siri and rampage your way through data what’s to stop you? Why should I care? Well, turns out that Siri is actually creating a pretty serious problem.  Here’s why:

No matter how many cell towers we throw up, sooner or later we’ll bump up against the rigid limits of the electromagnetic spectrum, the invisible frequencies over which all electronic communications move. 

As it stands, there is only so much ‘spectrum’ to go around. It is a precious resource—one that is becoming scarcer by the day. Cell networks and smartphone data usage are gobbling up spectrum pretty handily, but nothing compares to that ravenous beast, Siri.

FTC Chairman, Julius Genachowski spoke recently about this at George Washington University, arguing that, “what we need to do as a country is reallocate spectrum from the older, less efficient uses to newer, flexible broadband use.”

He proposed a market-based incentive auction, which “provides a real incentive for license holders of inefficiently used spectrum to put it back in the pot so we can realign it and increase it in ways condusive to our mobile world.”

This needs to happen and happen fast. Our guess is that technology like Siri will become more and more prevalent and if we don’t free up spectrum, things are going to grind to an abrupt halt in the mobile world.