A flood of network performance information this week for Verizon, AT&T, Sprint and T-Mobile added more mud for consumers to wade through.
Hello! And welcome to our Friday column, Worst of the Week. There’s a lot of nutty stuff that goes on in this industry, so this column is a chance for us at RCRWireless.com to rant and rave about whatever rubs us the wrong way. We hope you enjoy it!
Despite its best efforts, the mobile telecom space is unable to make anything simple for consumers. Sure, wireless carriers tout the millions and billions of dollars they spend each year in trying to make the mobile telecommunications experience easier for all, but in reality the market is more confusing today than ever.
A lot of this of course comes from the fact more people are relying more each day on mobile carriers and their respective networks. And when combined with the increased emphasis being placed by businesses on having a mobile identity, it’s really become too much for the mobile telecom space to handle in an efficient and simple manner.
Take the past week for example.
Each of the domestic market’s four largest operators spent Sunday evening and Monday morning flooding social media channels with random proof that their networks were better than their rival’s in handling traffic during the Super Bowl in Houston. These claims ranged from the amount of data transferred over respective networks to the speed in which that traffic was transmitted.
It was all very insightful, and I am sure was of great comfort to Atlanta Falcons’ fans who had their hearts ripped out of their chests at the end of the game and/or New England Patriots’ fans who are probably still trying to shake off the celebration.
AT&T and Verizon Wirelesswere very proud of the amount of data traffic transported across their networks, while Sprint and T-Mobile US were boastful of data speeds their networks were able to produce during the game.
Any sane person reading this commentary from mobile carriers would rightly assume all networks are awesome and can’t get no better.
But, these same carriers also spent the weeks leading up to the game touting the network improvements they were putting in place to handle the expected usage increase, which included bolstering distributed antenna system deployments that typically allow operators to cover the same locations using the same backhaul with the only difference being spectrum usage.
Even better, some of these enhancements were of a temporary variety through the use of cell on wheels, thus only really highlighting what the carrier was able to do in terms of planning and execution for a limited period of time, which while still impressive, is not really that impressive.
Making the Super Bowl festivities even better was the chaos that ensued just a few days later when OpenSignal released its latest network performance metrics, which showed distinct differences in mobile network performance.
The firm, which uses data collected from a downloadable smartphone application, said that during the second half of last year, Verizon Wireless and T-Mobile US offered up customers the highest average LTE network download speeds, with AT&T Mobility a fair ways back at No. 3 and Sprint playing a different game back in the No. 4 position.
In terms of LTE network reach, Verizon Wireless maintained its long-standing position as having the broadest coverage (thanks Western Wireless and Alltel!), though T-Mobile US was cited for making up ground. Despite having tens of billions of dollars to buy everything in site, AT&T Mobility somehow couldn’t purchase better coverage than its smaller rival, and Sprint again is playing some odd game that I just can’t figure out.
Sure, the OpenSignal results were based on data collected from across each carrier’s network over a several month period as opposed to the Super Bowl boasting that came from one specific location over a period of several hours.
But that’s the point: consumers can’t be expected to read methodology details on network performance testing, and for sure mainstream media resources can’t be expected to provide that level of detail. It’s not anyone’s fault, it’s just the way the world works.
And it’s obvious carriers like it that way. Here they were spending untold millions for commercials during the Super Bowl, all of which were so full of holes in terms of the facts as to be funnier when they weren’t trying to be funny, and that’s a pretty tough skill to master.
So, while the mobile telecom space will continue to tout its efforts in making life easier for consumers, the reality is that the message today is more muddled than ever and will likely never become any clearer.
Thanks for checking out this week’s column. Here’s a quick extra to get you through the weekend:
–According to a recent report from Strategy Analytics, the tablet market has somehow hit the skids.
The report found overall tablet sales dropped 9% during the fourth quarter of last year, with Apple and Samsung both notching double-digit drops in sales. However, the likes of Lenovo, Huawei and Amazon.com managed to score double-digit increases in sales. Go figure.
Overall, lagging tablet sales seem to be going hand-in-hand with the industry’s inability to get consumers excited about new device segments like smartwatches and other wearables, as well as what appear to be flat smartphone sales outside of anything with an “i” in front of it.
Maybe the industry can regain some of that device excitement with a push behind virtual reality devices, though I am guessing all of the consumers excited about that market segment have already been included in commercials touting the technology.
I welcome your comments. Please send me an e-mail at dmeyer@rcrwireless.com.
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