14 DAY TRIAL // Mobile broadband users in the UK are interested in the quality they enjoy when it comes to the mobile services offered by their wireless carrier. According to a consumer research launched by YouGov and Acision, 80 percent of users questioned on the matter experienced Quality of Service (QoS) issues. According to them, some of the main problems were with slower than expected speeds (67 percent), poor network coverage (49 percent), and inability to get connected (45 percent) or connection losses (40 percent). The survey was focused on the experience users receive when using smartphones, laptops and other mobile handsets.
According to the report, almost one third of all respondents (74 percent) would be interested in supporting an active approach to fairness that would result in the distribution of bandwidth between as many users as possible. Moreover, 49 percent of them said that they would gladly pay a small fee if that would result in the increase of the quality of the services they receive. 36 percent of questioned users access data-hungry video sites via their mobile connection, and the quality of this service was frequently a bad one. According to van Zanen, carriers would be able to improve the experience they offer to users if they focus on content optimizations.
“When reviewing the research, we identified three key areas where operators can deploy capabilities to raise QoS levels. The first one is defining fairness. When asked about the contentious issue of fair usage policies, 56% of research respondents were not aware if their operator had a fair usage policy in place and 71% were unaware that in many networks, 5% of users generate over 80 per cent of broadband traffic, causing slow download speeds and connection problems for all users. However, once aware of the issues surrounding the fair distribution of bandwidth, consumers responded positively to the option of allowing sophisticated fairness policies if this helped to improve the overall service,” said Steven van Zanen, senior vice president marketing, mobile broadband, Acision.
Of all people accessing video services, 63 percent reported frequent pauses, while 55 percent of them said these problems occurred on a regular basis. 48 percent of them said they would appreciate if the carrier applied content adaptation policies that would ensure better quality, the survey shows. “This demonstrates that a majority of users would accept an optimization policy which decreases video size in order to warrant uninterrupted playback. These video issues are all the more relevant as regular video users have a 9% higher ARPU then average users as they are consistently among the most active users of email, browsing, upload, video, music and online gaming services,” continued van Zanen. More info on the survey can be found on Acision's website here.