By Michelle Choi, an insider at Lease Advisors
When is the last time you downloaded an app to your phone? How long did it take to decide whether you were going to keep it? Probably no time at all. Mobile applications have just a few seconds to make an impression, and functionality, purpose, and interface aside, the deciding factor to keep the app often comes down to mobile network speed.
The speed at which mobile applications consistently and reliably send and receive data is called Quality of Delivery (QoD) and this metric is determined by a variety of factors. Among these are the number of subscribers, activity, speed, weather, and topographic features. Mobile app performance is further influenced by the type of application (shortform/longform, audio/video), device type, and content delivery network.
Quality of Delivery is typically measured in a few ways. Throughput (the processing rate) and latency (the time between input and response) are traditional metrics that measure the speed and capabilities of fixed broadband infrastructure, the Internet. Mobile networks, however, are a fundamentally different system that is more appropriately measured via packet loss and throughput variation. Packet loss percentage is the segment of sent or received “packets” of data that do not successfully arrive at their destination, resulting in broken images, unintelligible speech, or complete signal absence.
In terms of worldwide QoD, Asia and Central & South America experience the highest packet loss while the U.S. falls just below the worldwide averages. The U.S. has more than 100 million LTE subscribers—the highest globally—however the network performance is on par with the rest of the world. Data suggests that U.S. networks handle much more traffic over larger geographic distances than the countries that have not deployed 4G as fast as the U.S. Hugh Kelly of Kwicr, who conducted research on mobile broadband quality, stated that this “speaks to a well-developed, but heavily utilized infrastructure.”
Application and content developers have the opportunity to increase their return on investment (ROI) by decreasing packet loss, throughput variation, and consequently abandonment. Their ability to monetize is dependent on the infrastructure that supports the networks and applications that customers use. The U.S. may lead in deployment and subscription, but there is clearly room for improvement in the infrastructure that caters to the heavy data demand.
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