New consumer research sheds new light on the Quality of Experience challenges faced by U.S. carriers when it comes to the delivery of mobile broadband services today, especially video. That could translate into a revenue opportunity for them, ironically: Up to 63 percent of those surveyed said they would be willing to pay a small fee for services that improve QoE.
The research, from international research organization YouGov and mobile-data enablement provider Acision, questioned U.S. consumers about their mobile broadband experiences on smartphones, laptops and other mobile handsets. It found that, despite the rising popularity of mobile broadband, 74 percent had experienced QoE issues. The most encountered problems were slow speeds (60 percent), poor network coverage (35 percent), inability to get connected (29 percent) and connection loss (29 percent).
Almost half of consumers questioned (49 percent) said they regularly accessed data-hungry video sites via mobile connections. However, the QoE results worsened when it came to video: More than three-quarters (78 percent) encountered QoE issues such as frequent pauses, and as many as 68 percent experienced these problems on a regular basis.
Perhaps then, it's no wonder that two-thirds of video users (69 percent) said they would accept an optimization policy that improves performance of a video service, such as decreasing video size to enable uninterrupted playback. And 63 percent said they would pay for better QoE in general.
All of these issues were also spotlighted in the FCC's Broadband Performance report released in August, which noted that mobile broadband download speeds experienced by consumers lag advertised speeds, an issue the YouGov/Acision survey identified as one of the principle sources of frustration among mobile subscribers.
On the issue of fairness policies, the survey found that 75 percent of respondents were not aware if their carrier had a policy in place – considerably higher than the 56 percent result yielded in a similar study in the U.K. Also, 65 percent of those surveyed were unaware that in many networks just a small number of users generate more than 80 percent of broadband traffic, causing slow download speeds and connection problems. When those surveyed were made aware of the issues surrounding the fair distribution of bandwidth, over half of consumers responded positively to an active approach to fairness aimed at distributing bandwidth between as many people as possible to ease congestion to benefit all users (63 percent).
“Mobile broadband customers need more communication on the issues affecting their experience with the service," said Russell Feldman, associate director at YouGov. "We believe they are capable of recognizing there are problems with the service and are open to creative ways of dealing with them. Data caps are but one tool available to carriers, but the research shows that consumers will consider other service differentiators if given the choice."
To that end, respondents indicated that they're open to paying for services such as notifications when they have reached a certain spend limit (48 percent), fair distribution of bandwidth between consumers (45 percent), personalization capabilities (46 percent), a bundle sharing plan (46 percent) and the ability to set spending limits on their mobile broadband account (42 percent).
