63% of Mobile Consumers Want "Quality of Experience" Measures

Fully 74 percent of U.S. mobile users say they have experienced quality issues when using smartphones and laptops on the mobile broadband networks, YouGov and Acision report. Slow speeds, poor network coverage, inability to get connected and lost connections are among the top reported problems.

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).

About 63 percent of respondents say they support an active approach to maintaining quality of experience. That includes support for
optimization of data traffic and the differentiation of mobile broadband services. In other words, the very "packet discrimination" that network neutrality supporters say they want.

About 65 percent of those surveyed were unaware that in many networks just a small number of users generate over 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, 63 percent 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.

Service providers call that traffic shaping. Net neutrality supporters call that "discrimination." It appears users agree with service providers, at least in this survey.

Between 30 percent and 63 percent of respondents even agreed they would be open to pay a small fee for carrier measures that meant a better broadband experience. Net neutrality supporters say they want to outlaw Internet access "fast lanes." It appears users want them.

The research also confirmed the popularity of video services, with almost half of consumers questioned (49 percent) accessing  video sites using their mobile connection. As you might expect, 78 percent encountered QoE issues such as frequent pauses, and as many as 68 percent experienced these problems on a regular basis.

Fully 69 percent would accept an optimization policy that improves performance of a video service. For example, consumers were supportive of measures carriers could take to improve the quality of mobile video by decreasing video size to enable uninterrupted playback.

Consumers surveyed stated they would be willing to pay a small fee to receive services such as notifications when they have reached a certain spend limit on their mobile broadband service (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).

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At least according to this survey, mobile subscribers support traffic shaping and other optimization measures, including the opportunity to buy higher grades of service. As we have seen in recent days, consumers often do not want the policies and programs some elites think "are good for people."

Mobile Broadband Will Need a New Business Model

One way or the other, something has got to change in the mobile business as voice ceases to be the industry revenue driver. Today mobile service providers get 86 percent of their revenue from low-bandwidth applications like voice and text. But that will keep changing in predictable ways.

Namely, most capacity requirements will be driven by low-margin data rather than high-margin voice and text.  Over the long term, it is irrational to better price services in relationship to cost without attributing more revenue directly to the data services that are driving capital investment.

That doesn't mean every single service or application necessarily has to be priced in relationship to cost. Loss leaders at supermarkets, promotional DVD prices at Target and other promotional pricing happens all the time, in every business. Some products have high margin, others low or even negative margins.

The point is that current retail pricing will get more irrational as data demand grows, and that something will have to be done about it.

Carriers are investing in new capacity, but that alone will not be enough to bring revenue and capacity into balance. By 2013, virtually all traffic load will be driven by broadband data of one sort or another, especially video. That means, over time, new ways of charging for network usage will have to be created.

Like it or not, network management is going to be necessary, plus traffic offload and policy management. The issue, in part, is that demand is unevenly distributed. Even at peak hours of congestion, only a minor percentage of cell sites actually account for most of the congestion. To speak of congestion management at the "whole network" level is not to capture the issue.

The key issue is peak-hour congestion at perhaps 10 percent to 15 percent of sites. Put another way, even at peak congestion, 85 to 90 percent of sites do not experience difficulty. That means it might be necessary to use different policies at a small number of physical sites, not the entire network, even at peak hours.

So even if traffic shaping, bit priority policies and other tools are not generally required at every site, for every application or user, there will be a need to do so at some sites, some of the time.

Content Delivery Networks and Network Neutrality: Net Is Not Neutral

Much discussion about network neutrality seems to assume that the issue is bit or application "blocking," and from one perspective that is correct. The existing Federal Communications Commission rules about a users' right to use all lawful applications already prohibit blocking of legal applications on wired networks. The issue is whether those rules, and the other "Internet Freedoms" principles also should be extended to the wireless domain.

In another sense, popular perceptions are misguided or worse. There is a separate issue, that of whether it ever is permissible, for any legal reason, to shape traffic, either to maintain network performance, provide an enhanced service to a user, or create a new level of service.

Some will maintain there are other ways of maintaining end user experience aside from traffic shaping. That is arguably correct, but might cost so much that the entire consumer access pricing regime has to change in ways people will find objectionable.

Some argue that any traffic shaping of legal bits should be banned, because such practices have undesirable business impact. "No bits should have any priority," that line of reasoning suggests.

One might simply note that about 60 percent of video bits--almost universally served up by media companies--already enjoys such "unequal treatment." Indeed, that is the purpose of a content delivery network: to expedite the delivery of some bits, compared to others, so that a better end user experience is possible.

In fact, about $1.4 billion was spent in 2008 precisely to deliver such expedited bits. The U.S. market currently generates an estimated 55.8 percent of the global CDN traffic, though international traffic is now increasing at a faster rate than its domestic counterpart, according to Research and Markets.

And though video delivery historically has been the CDN staple, new growth areas include whole site delivery, dynamic content, "live" video, high-definition video, mobile and smartphone applications, other non-PC devices and adaptive bit rate streaming, Research and Markets notes.

Of the 22.5 billion professional video views served during 2009, Akamai delivered 31.9 percent, Limelight Networks 12 percent and Level 3 11.2 percent, says Research and Markets.. Additional CDNs active in the market include CD Networks, Velocix, Liquid Compass, Abacast, Mirror Image, Edgecast Networks, Highwinds, BitGravity, Cotendo and Internap, the firm notes.

The point is that preferential delivery of bits already is an established part of the way the Internet works. Private network users, especially businesses, also commonly set up traffic priority systems for their internal communications and content, as well.

The ability of a consumer end user to choose to use such services and applications is one of the implications of the network neutrality debate that often is lost. To reiterate, preferential treatment of bits already is happening on a wide scale, and for very good reasons: to preserve end user experience. Perhaps we ought not to be in such a rush to foreclose practices and capabilities of obvious value.

Traffic Shaping, Not Blocking

Users of RCN broadband access services are complaining about blocking of BitTorrent connections. That seems unlikely, though traffic shaping seems certain. RCN has in the past noted that more than 90 percent of upstream traffic was composed of P2P streams. And since upstream bandwidth is the key resource constraint, RCN traffic shaping was not unexpected. When users are sharing a scarce resource, some "rationing" is simply fairness.