Europe: Data ‘discussions’ in the RAN

Amdocs recently released a study on the State of the RAN as of the end of 2013 in comparison to the end of 2012. Sure, we all know that data continues to grow, video usage continues to grow and the customer experience challenges continue to grow as a result of overly busy networks. But some of these statistics are shocking and definitely worthy of sharing more widely.
Of course some of these results are driven by an increase in users having smartphones and as a result doing more via their smartphone than alternative devices/connections. It’s also interesting to note how the smartphones themselves impact these results and how the users of different smartphone devices behave.
Let’s look first at the smartphones themselves, regardless of vendor. Overall, the smartphones released in 2013 consume 40% more data then those released the prior year for both uploads (+140%) and downloads (+111%) year over year. What does this mean to the traffic patterns on networks – 98% of traffic is now data. This isn’t surprising if you think about all of the applications coming out seemingly every day to allow you to share your life, interests, relationships, etc. online. Where we used to have voice discussions, we now have data “discussions” to keep up with our relationships.
Another interesting point is related to the usage patterns of different device owners. The study looked at the European data usage of different devices. This is not a measure of the number of devices sold or the popularity of those devices, but of the data usage of different devices. The top three devices are all iPhone models, accounting for over 50% of the data traffic on the networks studied. The average iPhone session averaged a 133kbps download, whereas the average Android session was only 78kbps. Of course you could say that there might be more of these devices in these areas accounting for this variance, but the figures are so drastic it makes you wonder if there are different usage patterns of iPhone users. This would be an interesting topic to dig deeper into.
So what about tablets and MiFi sessions. In order to level set, the average smartphone user consumes about 5 megabytes of data per hour. The average tablet user – 12 megabytes per hour and the average MiFi user – 46 megabytes per hour! This makes a strong case for LTE deployment.
The question then arises as to whether LTE alone is enough to support a desirable user experience? Given the increased bandwidth supported and the reduction in time it takes to establish a data session – less than half – LTE seems to provide a holy grail. But there are still many growing pains associated with the ability to provide seamless mobility when moving/roaming. Which of course is a table stake on a mobile device.
Amdocs proposes the inclusion of SON solutions as a part of the LTE rollout strategy in order to support the customer experience users will expect when they move to a next generation of mobile connectivity. Whether or not this solves these growth problems remains to be seen. But it is sure that manual observation and response times will no longer fit the bill of what customers want and expect from their mobile service provider.
Access the full report at http://solutions.amdocs.com/SOTR.html .