I’m sitting here in a small closed room, deep in a building with poor reception. I click a link to open up a picture from the internet, and then it takes several minutes for the picture to load. If I had been outside, with better reception, the picture loads in under a second. So I am assuming the cell tower is continuously sending the information to my phone. Does the network read the amount of data sent by the tower or does it only count what my phone decrypts? Follow up question: if it only counts what my phone picks up, then wouldn’t that be exploitable?
In: Technology
> Does the network read the amount of data sent by the tower or does it only count what my phone decrypts?
Neither precisely, it considers what it is trying to send to you. If you have a bad connection it will be repeating itself a lot until you acknowledge receipt of a given packet. Requested data is split into small chunks called packets which are sent individually. Not getting a packet means they can just resend that bit rather than starting over entirely.
> if it only counts what my phone picks up, then wouldn’t that be exploitable?
Not really. Remember that everything is split into packets and acknowledged along the way or it will be sent again. If your phone is refusing to acknowledge packets then the connection isn’t going to work; it might drop and need to be reconnected or you simply won’t ever get anything beyond the first few packets of your requests.
Most likely they charge based on what you request to download and the details of what is actually transmitted is handled at the tower and typically ignored.
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