In a cellular network, even just establishing a connection is while use up resources. It's not just about licensing fees. There's a lot of low level control signaling required to keep a terminal connected and in sync, and a base station can only keep so many connected at once. So you really want to connect rarely and then download a lot at once and disconnect again. The more seldom they connect, the more terminals you can support.
Indeed, initializing a session is a heavyweight operation. But something polling every 15 seconds is likely never going to tear down the session. From what I've heard the timeouts tend to be a bit longer than that (e.g. 30s), exactly for that reason.
And yes, there could be physical limits as well causing an individual cell to be fully congested due to open but idle sessions. Either way the polling is causing problems disproportionate to the amount of actual traffic.
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In a cellular network, even just establishing a connection is while use up resources. It's not just about licensing fees. There's a lot of low level control signaling required to keep a terminal connected and in sync, and a base station can only keep so many connected at once. So you really want to connect rarely and then download a lot at once and disconnect again. The more seldom they connect, the more terminals you can support.
Indeed, initializing a session is a heavyweight operation. But something polling every 15 seconds is likely never going to tear down the session. From what I've heard the timeouts tend to be a bit longer than that (e.g. 30s), exactly for that reason.
And yes, there could be physical limits as well causing an individual cell to be fully congested due to open but idle sessions. Either way the polling is causing problems disproportionate to the amount of actual traffic.