Mobile Webpages Load Slow, But Ads are a Big Part of the Problem

After an analysis of 10,000 mobile web domains, DoubleClick found that most mobile sites have an average load time of 19 seconds over 3G connections.

You might assume that 4G Long Term Evolution networks would perform much better. They are better, but not that much better. “On a 4G network the average time isn’t much better: 14 seconds,” DoubleClick says.

That is important since other studies suggest that 53 percent of mobile site visits are abandoned if pages take longer than three seconds to load.

Conversely, sites that load in five seconds get 25 percent  higher ad viewability, experience

70 percent longer average sessions and have 35 percent lower bounce rates

Some 46 percent of consumers say that waiting for pages to load is what they dislike the most when browsing the mobile web, DoubleClick says.

Oddly enough, ads arguably are the main reason mobile webpage load times are a problem.

On average, mobile ads take five seconds to load, or roughly twice as long as ads on desktop.

That’s because, while a mobile webpage size is 1.49 Mbps, on average, mobile ads are 816 KB, more than half of the mobile page download size, according to Business Intelligence.

How Artificial Intelligence is Directly Related to Core Telecom Service Revenues

It is not always completely obvious how various technologies are related to the core of the telecom industry. Consider artificial intelligence, which might be considered an esoteric matter of little direct relevance for core telecom service revenues.

So here's an argument about why artificial intelligence (or machine learning or cognitive technologies in general are of direct relevance for tier-one telecom service providers.

After the mobile data market has reached saturation, and amidst declines in all other legacy service revenues, how will tier-one service providers replace at least half of all current revenues within a decade? 

Some of us argue that, at the moment, the conceivable big new revenues come from the broad Internet of Things and machine-to-machine communications areas, simply because all those sensors and servers will require communications, often mobile communications.

So core telecom revenues might substantially hinge on IoT and M2M. But making sense of all that data necessarily requires a number of other developments, including artificial intelligence (or machine learning or cognitive technologies). 

In that sense, artificial intelligence (the ability to make sense of mountains of possibly unstructured data) is directly related to the future of core telecom service revenues. 

That might be why IBM’s Watson will be embedded into Cisco routers and services.

So IoT essentially requires artificial intelligence, and mobile operators require the big revenues IoT will drive.

Shipping Cost Drives 42% of Shopping Cart Abandonments

source: Royal Mail

Free shipping--at least in the United Kingdom--really matters, a study of e-commerce behavior has found.

Cart abandonment rates in 2016 are the same as 2015: 91 percent of online shoppers claim to have abandoned a cart over the last twelve months.

However the frequency of shoppers abandoning orders has decreased by 10 percent since 2015.

Website and technical problems showed the biggest improvements, with consumers reporting they less frequently abandoned a possible purchase for those reasons.

There was also a decline in those saying “I wasn’t happy with the delivery charge”, which fell from 44 percent to 42 percent.

Still, delivery costs cause 42 percent of cart abandonments. About 66 percent of online shoppers say they are unlikely to place an order if they feel the cost of delivery is too high.

About half of online shoppers expect no minimum spend to receive free delivery. About 29 percent of respondents said they would shop elsewhere if a retailer had a minimum spend policy.

Younger shoppers are significantly more likely to spend the required amount to qualify for free delivery, while older shoppers will simply switch to another retailer who doesn’t charge for delivery.

Autonomous Vehicles Do Not Absolutely Require IoT; Traffic Management Does

source: McKInsey

At least in lower volumes, self-driving cars do not absolutely require that robust networks operating at a level above the individual vehicle’s sensors be in place.

Uber’s limited launch of autonomous car service in Pittsburgh shows that.  

Even when autonomous vehicles are much more common, it might be true that telemetry will operate at the vehicle level.

Internet of Things networks and edge computing will probably operate at a more systemic level. For example, it has been estimated that 40 percent of urban vehicle congestion is caused by people looking for parking.

IoT-based systems are perhaps more likely to be used for such broader traffic management functions than individual vehicle safety.  

source: Business Insider

Server Market, Metro and WAN Bandwidth Now Driven by Hyperscale Data Centers

source: Cisco

The global server market now is driven by huge data centers, much as global wide area network bandwidth demand is shaped by those same hyperscale data center sites, while metro traffic likewise is shaped by internal data center traffic and data center-to-data center connections.

"The real driver of global growth continues to be the hyper-scale datacenter segment," Gartner analyst Jeffrey Hewitt noted in a statement releasing the quarterly estimate. "The enterprise and small or mid-size business segments remain relatively flat as end users in these segments accommodated their increased application requirements through virtualization and considered cloud alternatives."

source: Cisco

OTT bypass--when OTT app providers terminate calls through an OTT app that have begun life as a normal fixed or mobile telephone call--could reduce carrier revenues as much as 30 percent, argues Andy Gent, Revector CEO.

OTT bypass affects carrier revenue because the bypass shifts call termination revenue away from telcos and to app providers.

“In the past month we have detected OTT Bypass across the globe with several operators reporting a reduction in termination call revenues of 25 percent, month on month,” said Gent.

“We have seen calls that have been made from one mobile phone number directly to another be received on a Viber app across three different continents and more than 15 network operators and national telecommunications regulators have contacted us regarding this issue in the past two weeks,”Gent said.

In the longer term, IDC expects server market growth to be driven by software-defined, disaggregated systems and network edge-deployed Internet of Things (IoT) compute," said Kuba Stolarski, research director, Computing Platforms at IDC.

By 2019, more than four-fifths (86 percent) of workloads will be processed by cloud data centers; 14 percent will be processed by traditional data centers. Much of that traffic will remain in single in metro areas, rather than crossing the wide area network.

Traffic between data centers is growing faster than either traffic to end-users or traffic within the data center, and by 2018,  traffic between data centers will account for almost nine percent of total data center traffic, up from nearly seven percent at the end of 2013, according to Cisco.

The portion of traffic residing within the data center will decline slightly between 2014 and 2019, accounting for 75.5 percent of data center traffic in 2014 and about 73 percent by 2019, Cisco predicts.

Global Data Center Traffic, 2014–2019
	2014	2015	2016	2017	2018	2019	CAGR 2014–2019
By Type (EB per Year)
Data center to user	613	760	946	1,185	1,495	1,886	25%
Data center to data center	234	321	432	564	723	905	31%
Within data center	2,602	3,342	4,233	5,235	6,358	7,566	24%
By Segment (EB per Year)
Consumer	2,103	2,758	3,550	4,444	5,599	6,885	27%
Business	1,346	1,665	2,061	2,540	2,977	3,472	21%
By Type (EB per Year)
Cloud data center	2,110	2,956	4,017	5,328	6,854	8,622	33%
Traditional data center	1,339	1,467	1,594	1,656	1,722	1,735	5%
Total (EB per Year)
Total data center traffic	3,449	4,423	5,611	6,984	8,576	10,357	25%

source: Cisco

source: Cisco

OTT Bypass a New Revenue Challenge for Mobile Operators

OTT bypass--when OTT app providers terminate calls through an OTT app that have begun life as a normal fixed or mobile telephone call--could reduce carrier revenues as much as 30 percent, argues Andy Gent, Revector CEO.

OTT bypass affects carrier revenue because the bypass shifts call termination revenue away from telcos and to app providers.

“In the past month we have detected OTT Bypass across the globe with several operators reporting a reduction in termination call revenues of 25 percent, month on month,” said Gent.

“We have seen calls that have been made from one mobile phone number directly to another be received on a Viber app across three different continents and more than 15 network operators and national telecommunications regulators have contacted us regarding this issue in the past two weeks,”Gent said.

Smartphone Apps Drive U.S. Content Usage

It will not surprise you that smartphones now are the ways most people interact with the Internet, in developed or developing nations and markets. In the U.S. market, for example, smartphones represent a plurality of Internet content use for nearly every age demographic.

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