A team of researchers funded by the Finnish government has developed a technology that could cut the power consumption of 3G smartphones by up to 74 percent—and extend the reach of the wireless Internet to millions of people in developing countries in the process. Developed with funding from Tekes, the FInnish Funding Agency for Technology and Innovation, the system uses an approach similar to the workaround used by Skyfire and others to run Flash sites on iPhones, using network-based proxies to offload the majority of data downloading and processing.

The research team from Finland's Aalto University, which included Professor Jukka Manner, Dr. Edward Mutafungwa, doctoral student Le Wang, and masters student Yeswanth Puvvala, presented their research today at Africomm 2011, a conference on telecommunications infrastructure in Africa. They designed the system with the needs of Africa in mind, basing their tests on data collected from the cellular networks in Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya.

Manner said in an e-mail interview with Ars Technica that adoption of broadband wireless Internet in East Africa has been slowed by the power consumption of accessing and downloading data; while 90 percent of the population in the region lives within the coverage area of cellular networks, few have access to reliable sources of electricity. By increasing the battery life of low-cost 3G devices, the researchers theorized, Internet access could be extended to a much larger percentage of the population in those countries.

"East Africa was taken as a use case because Edward knew of the challenges and the need," Manner said. "We basically could have used any place on the planet."

Mutafungwa gathered statistical data about cellular networks in Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya, Manner said, "in terms on availability of the power grid and what are the popular websites [in the region]." Using that information, the team developed different strategies for providing access to those websites from 3G phones, and measured the power consumption profile for each of them.

The prototype system developed by the research team is a combination of what amounts to an enhanced Web proxy server and highly optimized communications between the smartphone and the proxy. The proxies don't have to be part of the cellular network, Manner said—they can run in the cloud, and used by smartphones anywhere in the world. The technology is now being developed for deployment as part of Tekes's Energy and Cost Efficiency for Wireless Access (ECEWA) program in partnership with Ericsson, Efore, ECE, and the Tampere University of Technology.