Since my internet connection is fairly slow (only ~9.5 Mbps downstream, ~1.2-1.5 Mbps upstream) and I downstream traffic costs money per byte, I try to minimise the amount of background chit chat activity coming from all our iPads and iPhones.
So automatic updates of iOS and all apps are all turned off, as too is anything similar in individual apps. Many apps appear to have databases of some sort that need to be kept up to date via the internet. There are some settings that I can see that appear to be related to (maybe) this updating by apps. I have considered fiddling with such settings but I don’t know what I’m doing. There are also backups of the system state to the cloud - which I can’t control the timing of - apart from doing the backups manually so they don’t need to be don’t automatically. And then there is general iCloud filesystem traffic going to and fro. There are also some apps such as the Twitter client that generate a bit of traffic, not sure when.
I am not sure how much low-level sporadic or fairly frequent traffic remains after my campaign. I ought to do some traffic captures to see. Because of my tampering with settings and turning various things off I don’t know how much traffic there is all the time on a box-standard iPad.
My wife’s iPad has about a million apps in it. Some of them seem to be almost just replacements for some company’s website. I don’t know how much background traffic, if any, they generate.
Does anyone have any observations about the general level of background traffic upstream and downstream in an iOS box?
If you are doing speed tests, then this will all really muck things up. Some times I seem to get speed test results that vary a lot and there are too many possible explanations for this. But background traffic, including internet traffic to/from another machines on the LAN, is going to completely wreck the results. Speed testers ought to really check for this by seeing if the internet connection is quiet, with some sort of pre-test, but go knows how. Asking the router would be nice. If only there were widely supported standard interfaces for talking to routers and getting all kinds of info. Would checking arrival times of specially time-stamped test packets at the remote ends be one part of a solution?
