According to a research report published by Amdocs, mobile traffic on operators’ network has completely shifted from voice to data. The research highlights the urgency for service providers to build and optimise mobile networks to assure network performance and quality, increasing customer satisfaction and creating new revenue opportunities.

The annual State of the Radio Access Network (RAN) research report includes analysis of more than 4 million voice and data connections from more than 100,000 mobile devices at few of the busiest network locations around the world in the past twelve months. The radio access network provides wireless mobile connection for phones and tablets, using a combination of technologies, including small cells and macro cells, utilising 3G, 4G (LTE) and Wi-Fi (for data).

The key findings of the report include:

·The share of network traffic from data has grown to 98 per cent – up from 90 per cent in the previous 12-month period.  The growth demonstrates subscribers’ overwhelming use of smartphones and tablets to consume and share content.

·Data demand leads to an increase in dropped calls: The stress placed on networks has led to an increase in customer experience issues as network demand grows, with dropped data and voice calls increasing by 121 per cent. The most stressed locations showed a 17 per cent dropped call rate. While these figures indicate ever-increasing load carried by the RAN, the level to which individual customers were impacted often depended on their choice of mobile handset.

·Long term evolution (LTE - 4G) improves customer experience but does not increase data traffic exponentially. The time to establish an LTE data session is less than half that of 3G, delivering a data experience that is much closer to home broadband. Although LTE drives increase in data consumption, high bandwidth data consumption (eg video) did not increase, indicating that usage patterns, potentially governed by data plans, remain little different from 3G networks.

·Data traffic becomes the primary source of subscriber issues: Top customer frustrations include: Lack of data coverage (47 per cent); monthly limits (30 per cent) and download costs (16 per cent).

·Voice grew too, customers move indoors: Despite voice calls also increasing by 16 per cent, the greatest shift was to indoor usage - the period saw an increase of mobile phone usage in-building by 33 per cent.  With indoor data users experiencing up to a 50 per cent drop in data throughput; this shift will have a significant impact on customer experience.

“The research shows that the move to LTE/ 4G provides an opportunity to improve the customer experience without exponentially increasing data demand,” said Rebecca Prudhomme, vice-president, product and solutions marketing at Amdocs. “Service providers need to address this challenge by implementing planning and optimisation solutions to manage an increasingly active subscriber base that not only wants to consume data but produce and share it in real time.”