Mike Flanagan, CTO of Arieso, was doing the media rounds this week promoting a piece of work his company has done analysing which smartphones drive the most data traffic across mobile networks.
Not surprisingly, the work was picked up by many outlets because it had a headline finding that Android users are more data hungry than iPhone4 users, especially on the uplink. That’s good SEO for a news site for a start, and a nice hook for a story.
But I’m not sure what the actual value of this work is. To be fair, Flanagan wasn’t trying to make out his research was any more than what it is – it’s a 24 hour snapshot of one network in the USA. But partly because of client confidentiality, there’s little context behind the findings. The Samsung Galaxy was found to generate nearly two and a half times the uplink data than a typical iPhone 3G, but we don’t know why – was there a service push, or a particular event that day that could explain it? We don’t know.
Nor can we correlate that to any other known findings so far – does the Galaxy always generate a 250% uplift on uplink data over the iPhone 3G? Again, we don’t know – we just know that amongst one user group, on a given day in one market, it did so.
This lack of supporting evidence provides support for Flanagan’s wider point, however. Flanagan said that operators need to be aware that when they range a particular model, they are likely to see a particular type of data usage. At the moment, they are playing a guessing game, he said. That’s a valid point – and of course Flanagan would not suggest that operators base all their decisions on this piece of work – the results are illustrative, rather than definitive.
What the research does show is that, as a rough rule of thumb, the more recent the phone model the more data is used. That sounds about right, intuitively.
It also shows that if this data is to be of use, we need a lot more of it. What is the economic impact, for example, of a phone generating 250% more data than another phone. It may not make any difference. It may all be contained within a data plan, at quiet times, in a location with relatively few other heavy users – in which case so what? Or it may be in a capacity-constrained location with a host of other heavy users, in which case you, as an operator, are going to want to know.
So I think it points to a greater issue, that operators are going to need a much more detailed picture of usage, by handset, OS, location, time and user – both because they must plan and use the finite resources they have and also so they can get into the realm of effective customer experience management as smartphone usage grows.
CEM is a topic that means all things to all people, but its core meaning – how operators will manage the end user experience – is going to be a hot topic in 2011. We at Mobile Europe have some events planned on just this topic for 2011. And indeed we’ve started the ball rolling with a webinar, held yesterday, on the area. If you want to see what analyst Karl Whitelock and assurance company Accanto Systems make of current CEM practice, then do watch the recording. https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/818337169
Another aspect operators will have to deal with is assurance in an LTE environment – which changes things for them by introducing new elements, interfaces and protocols. And guess what, we’ve an event on that too, happening tomorrow. You can register for that here. https://www1.gotomeeting.com/register/171622993
So if you are on the webinar tomorrow, I look forward to speaking to you then.
Keith Dyer
Editor
Mobile Europe
LINKS:
http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news/news-anaylsis/8320-what-you-need-to-know-about-mobile-3d-and-why
http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news/features/8328-real-world-challenges-in-deploying-lte-networks
http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news/press-wire/8335-nokia-siemens-networks-and-orange-armenia-modernise-network-for-hd-voice-and-higher-speed-internet-
http://www.mobileeurope.co.uk/news/press-wire/8333-allot-and-openet-partner-on-online-policy-management-solutions-for-mobile-broadband