iPhone Max Permitted Cellular Transfer Rate

Question

In another question regarding our “transferring excessive volumes of data” rejection letter I asked your advise about what could be done to limit our bandwidth usage.

Thanks for your replies, we found a solution: we've hobbled the application when its on 3G/Edge and by putting the download on a different thread then halting the thread when it gets to the bandwidth limit we set in code. Now I need to know what a reasonable download rate is.

Apple provides NO guidelines that I can find other than the app must not, in "Apple's reasonable (sic) judgment excessively use or unduly burden network capacity or bandwidth"

And does anyone know what "Apple's best practices and other guidelines on how Applications should access and use the cellular network" are exactly.

Answer 1

If you are on the Edge network you can saturate the pipe, since it is so slow anyway. If you are on 3G I'd say 20-50KB/s is reasonable.

My two cents...

Answer 2

I know from programming on mobile devices (pre-iPhone!) that these kinds of guidelines are on a carrier-by-carrier basis, and have nothing really to do with Apple. Unfortunately, you'd have to contact all of the carriers that support the iPhone (or a reasonable subset) to be confident you can come up with a lowest common denominator. Until Apple comes up with more written, formal guidelines, you're stuck making educated guesses.