Amdocs, a leading provider of customer experience systems and services, released new research into mobile traffic, showing an almost complete shift from voice to data. The research highlights the urgency for service providers to build and optimise mobile networks to assure network performance and quality, increasing customer satisfaction and creating new revenue opportunities.
The annual State of the Radio Access Network (RAN)1 white paper includes analysis of more than 4 million voice and data connections from more than 100,000 mobile devices at some of the busiest network locations around the world in the past twelve months. The radio access network provides wireless mobile connection for phones and tablets, using a combination of technologies, including small cells and macro cells, utilising 3G, 4G (LTE) and Wi-Fi (for data).
According to the report, the share of network traffic from data has grown to 98% up from 90% in the previous 12-month period. The growth demonstrates subscribers’ overwhelming use of smartphones and tablets to consume and share content.
The report further highlights the reason for dropped calls stating,“The stress placed on networks has led to an increase in customer experience issues as network demand grows, with dropped data and voice calls increasing by 121%. The most stressed locations showed a 17% dropped call rate. While these figures give a stark reminder of the ever-increasing load carried by the RAN, the level to which individual customers were impacted often depended on their choice of mobile handset.”
Further, although LTE drives some increase in data consumption, high bandwidth data consumption (eg video) did not increase, indicating that usage patterns,potentially governed by data plans,remain little different from 3G networks.
Some of the primary subscriber issues remain to be data traffic wherein lack of data coverage constitutes 47%, monthly limits about 30% and download costs 16%. Despite voice calls also increasing by 16%, the greatest shift was to indoor usage – the period saw an increase of mobile phone usage in-building by 33%. With indoor data users experiencing up to a 50% drop in data throughput; this shift will have a significant impact on customer experience.
“The research shows that the move to LTE/ 4G provides an opportunity to improve the customer experience without exponentially increasing data demand,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, Vice President of Product and Solutions Marketing at Amdocs.