Dropped data and voice calls increased by 121 percent in the last 12 months, said an Amdocs survey of more than 100,000 mobile devices from the busiest network locations.
The State of the Radio Access Network (RAN) Survey said the share of network traffic from data has grown to 98 percent – up from 90 percent in the previous 12-month period. The growth demonstrates subscribers’ overwhelming use of smartphones and tablets to consume and share content, said Amdocs.
Amdocs survey said the stress placed on networks has led to an increase in customer experience issues as network demand grows. The most stressed locations showed a 17 percent dropped call rate.
The survey noted that LTE 4G improves customer experience but does not increase data traffic exponentially.
The time to establish a LTE data session is less than half that of 3G, delivering a data experience that is much closer to home broadband. 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.
Top customer frustrations include: Lack of data coverage (47 percent); monthly limits (30 percent) and download costs (16 percent), said Amdocs.
Despite voice calls also increasing by 16 percent, the greatest shift was to indoor usage – the period saw an increase of mobile phone usage in-building by 33 percent. With indoor data users experiencing up to a 50 per cent drop in data throughput; this shift will have a significant impact on customer experience.
Rebecca Prudhomme, vice president of product and solutions marketing at Amdocs, said: “Service providers need to address this challenge by implementing planning and optimization solutions to manage an increasingly active subscriber base that not only wants to consume data but produce and share it in real time.”
