Phones Today became more and more sophisticated. They are no longer devices for placing calls or for sending and receiving text messages only. They have become more “smart” and feature packed. A phone is now a PDA, a media player, an internet device and much more which is entirely different from what it was like say 10 years ago. The advancement of the cell phone technology has caused these devices to demand more power. Sadly (and this is my personal opinion) the advancement in Battery technology has not been on par with progress in cellular devices, standards and networks. This is where new network technologies like Fast Dormancy come in play in an attempt to optimize battery live of our power hungry Devices.

What is Fast Dormancy? In simple terms its a device feature that enables mobile devices to notify the cellular base stations when the radio resource allocated to the device is no longer in use, so that the radio resource could be immediately released other than waiting for a timeout event. For instance lets say you are browsing a webpage using your cellular data plan. You stop at a certain webpage (for example to read this article) the connection is maintained and the device will be registered on the network even if data isn’t received or transmitted (always on) and will remain like that until a timeout event is invoked (as per the network rules as to how much time to wait before connection is terminated due to idle timeout). During this time the device’s battery will be drained needlessly in addition to increased congestion on the cellular network due to numerous idle connections. From a device perspective radio power consumes battery so employing fast dormancy should save battery power and increase its life. This also has an advantage to networks as it reduces congestion. But This doesn’t come without a major disadvantage to the very same cellular networks and operators. The making and breaking of the connections increases the signaling traffic and wastes network resources. The workaround to this was done by Nokia Siemens in collaboration with Qualcomm to employ NCFD or Network Control Fast Dormancy in which the device is put on a battery saving idle state while maintaining its network identity without the need to establish a new connection and request a new identity for the device on the network.

How does this affect/benefit us Android Users? Well, too many factors come into play here. The most important being your operator’s network being optimized for Fast Dormancy. In addition each device manufacturer has its own proprietary approach to deploy Fast Dormancy (and well all know proprietary and android don’t play nice regarding third party development). Also the NFCD and other carrier enforced approaches will be designed to override any individual device settings that may ignore the Network Controls. Finally Fast dormancy benefits those who use cellular Data, its of little or no value to those who use wifi for internet and other related services.