A team at the University of Michigan and Microsoft Research has uncovered, for the first time, the frequently suboptimal network practices of more than 100 cellular carriers.

By recruiting almost 400 volunteers to run an app on their phones that probes a carrier's networks, the team discovered, for example, that one of the four major U.S. carriers is slowing its network performance by up to 50 percent. They also found carrier policies that drained users' phone batteries at an accelerated rate, and security vulnerabilities that could leave devices open to complete takeover by hackers.

For decades, researchers have studied "middleboxes"—the network hardware that Internet service providers (ISPs) use to ferry packets of data from one endpoint to another. But the current work, by Zhaoguang Wang of the University of Michigan and colleagues, titled An Untold Story of Middleboxes in Cellular Networks, is the first significant attempt to apply this kind of research to cellular networks worldwide.

[h/t Infrastructurist]