vB Easy Archive - does WM6 + Hotmail + "as items arrive" = direct push?

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does WM6 + Hotmail + "as items arrive" = direct push?
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Posted by: mvanstone

Forgive me if the answer is already out there. I searched up and down google but I couldn't find a definite black and white answer to the question "does Hotmail support direct push"

I want to know if there is any difference between the amount of data used using hotmail and the amount of data used using an exchange server with direct push.

If you setup a hotmail account on a WM6 smartphone and select "As items arrive" under Sync Frequency is it actually direct push or is it just some form of reduced polling?

The reason I would like to know is I only have the 10mb plan from Rogers which works out to about 320k/day. I find that even if I don't receive a single email or use any data at all I still end up racking up close to 200k. (I use gprs monitor to tell). So that tells me that if hotmail is using direct push, direct push isnt really push at all and basically sucks.

Rogers advertises 10mb as equaling 2500 emails per month... I realize that is inflated a lot but its quite a stretch.

Posted by: siliconvalley78

It's just about direct push. I've used both, and the difference is not noticeable. Data use could be a bit higher, but I don't notice that since I have an unlimited plan.

Pritesh

Posted by: alphadog00

Direct Push doesn't mean No Data. The client has to maintain a connection to the server, but that is easy: open a TCP socket and leave it open. But the server needs to know that that the client has not just gone away without closing nicely and the client needs to know the same thing - so there are keep alive packets. And of course if you go into an area and lose your data connection - even for a few minutes, the connection has to be created again.

There are min and max values for the hearbeat interval - but if we assume that the max value is 30 minutes, then there will be a heartbeat packet sent 48 times per day. If it fills up 1500 byte packet, then 75K data is just spent on heartbeat. If you have a calendar appointment change, contact change, or any other change on the server that you are syncing, then the client is notified via Push and it initiates a sync. The device and server have to know each other is there in any relationship and that uses data. The older AUTD was better in this regard as it used an SMS message to tell the phone to pull data - but SMS is unreliable - the server really doesn't know if the client got the message, and no one wanted to pay for SMS to do email.

As for 2500 emails equaling 10MB - they are on crack. I have measured data usage for doing just plain POP email and the client sends at least 10 packets to login and check for messages - this is 5K even if there is no mail - do this every 5 minutes and you burn 2 Mbytes per day. This doesn't even count if you are doing SSL and there are over 20 packets in the handshake.

I did the 10Mb plan for a while on VZW - checked my email a few times per day and only downloaded headers. It is very hard to do any email with a 10MB data plan.

Posted by: mvanstone

Thanks for the reply alphadog00, answered my question perfectly.

Guess I'll be switching to manual sync until rogers offers up some more affordable plans.

Thanks again.