How To Measure Bandwidth of Interviews on Android

Overview

This How-To will show you how to measure the amount of bandwidth consumed per interview for a survey in a few simple steps:

Step 1: Understanding the parameters that affect the bandwidth

Step 2: Measuring the bandwidth of the data with Android’s 3^rd Party Application

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Step 1: Understanding the parameters that affect the bandwidth

Here is a list of parameters affecting the size & bandwidth of an interview \ survey:

• Size\Length of the survey.
• Attachments attached to the survey (Media, Subject Stores)
• Amount of Quota cells:
  a. When using regular quotas, the quotas will sync every time an interview is done and will consume some bandwidth.
  b. If using Live Quotas, the frequency of quota syncing will be more frequent, therefore, consume more data.
  c. The more quota cells you have – the more data is consumed each sync.
• Sync Interval: the more frequent the application sync’s, the more data it consums, you can change the sync interval through the app’s settings – the default is 30 minutes.
  
• GPS Sampling: Capturing the GPS locations consums data too, if you use constant GPS sampling or fast intervals of GPS sampling, it would consume bigger amount of data:
  

Please note that if a survey was changed and saved, the device will sync only the relevant “new” changes of the survey, and will not re-download all of it and it’s attachments to the device.
For example, if you changed only a text of a specific question and saved it, the next sync will download only the text changes of this question, and will not need to re-download all the others.

Furthermore, in order to save cost for our customer’s bandwidth, data is being compressed it is being sent to our servers.

Also, please note that if this device is moved from one person to another and the other user has different surveys assigned to him/her, the device will need to download the other surveys and upon switching back again download these surveys. 

Step 2: Measuring the bandwidth of the data with Android’s 3^rd Party Application

As bandwidth consumption varies due to a vast amount of parameters affecting it, we recommend using Bandwidth Monitoring application for best and most precise results.

There is a free application from Android which is very handy when it comes to measuring bandwidth, its called: Bandwidth Monitor and you can find it on Google Play Store.
Here is the link for the app:
Bandwidth Monitor – Google Play Store

Basically, all you need to do is get it on your device, reset the monitor before starting to use STG and monitor how much data STG consumes while conducting the particular interview\survey.

That’s it!

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