1.4
Shift in Focus from Quality of Networks to Quality of
Service
·
Mobile
operators in advanced economies have penetrated about as low as they currently
can into the marginal user population – growth must come from taking market
share away from other carriers while increasing the average revenue per user
(ARPU) through new services and new pricing plans. One of the ways that
operators have always differentiated themselves is in the quality of their network.
Network outages, dropped or uncompleted calls, and poor data transmission
speeds are typical issues that cause subscribers to switch carriers. Meanwhile,
the expectations of end-users are rapidly rising while consumer barriers to
switching have lowered through regulator-mandated requirements for number
portability among carriers. Thus, the operators are focusing on quality of
service as one of the key drivers of end-customer acquisition and retention (see
Figure 3 below).
Figure
3: Growth in mobile data traffic is
driving investments in mobile broadband and 4G