Mobile Market and Network Planning - Part 4

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