Amdocs has released its latest State of the Radio Access Network survey, and the numbers show that data absolutely dominates mobile networks, accounting for 98% of traffic — and that stress on networks from the data tsunami is leading to compromised quality of experience.
The survey is based on more than 4 million voice and data connections from more than 100,000 mobile devices in the busiest network locations globally in the past 12 months.
Last year’s survey showed that data traffic accounted for 90% of overall network traffic. This year’s survey pushed that figure even higher and “demonstrates subscribers’ overwhelming use of smartphones and tablets to consume and share content,” according to Amdocs. The company said that voice calls increased 16% from the previous year, but data grew so much faster that voice was an even smaller percentage of overall traffic than the previous year.
The company noted that the demand for data is leading to an increase in dropped calls, both data and voice connections. Amdocs said that that dropped data and voice calls increased by 121% from last year, with the most stressed network locations showing a 17% dropped call rate. But individual devices are impacted differently, Amdocs said, concluding that “the level to which individual customers were impacted often depended on their choice of mobile handset.”
Other findings included:
- LTE does appear to improve efficiency and speed while not driving large increases in usage. Amdocs said that the time to establish an LTE data session was less than half that of 3G, but despite “some increase in data consumption” that the use of high-bandwidth services such as video remained much the same as in 3G networks.
- Top customer frustrations including lack of data coverage (47%), monthly limits (30%) and download costs (16%).
- Usage continues to shift indoors. Amdocs said that in-building mobile phone usage was up 33%. Quality of experience indoors is impacted, however — indoor data users saw up to a 50% drop in data throughput.
