According to Kwicr, a mobile experience company in its recently released report, “ Mobile Broadband Report: Quality of Delivery for Mobile Apps", traditional metrics used to measure the quality of cellular and Wi-Fi networks – throughput and latency – do not adequately reflect the users’ mobile experience. The company attributes this to ‘bandwidth variability’ within and across mobile app sessions.
The company said that it has analyzed traffic from millions of mobile apps users worldwide over a three month period and claims that this is the first time the bandwidth variability has been measured and analyzed on a global scale.
Kwicr's analysis of more than 350,000 mobile app sessions showed that packet loss and bandwidth variability occurred almost continually even within individual app sessions. The company explained that TCP/IP was originally designed for fixed line networks and automatically slows throughput when packet loss is detected. As a result, TCP/IP often slowed throughput far below what was actually possible on the mobile networks analyzed.
The company also highlighted the importance of Quality of Delivery (QoD) or the speed at which a mobile app can reliably send and receive data without stalls, excessive buffering or other lapses in performance, saying that QoD measures the impact on user experience, abandonment rates, usage frequency and other key business metrics for mobile applications.
Some of the key findings of Kwicr's Mobile Broadband Report include:
4G LTE Is No Performance Guarantee – 4G networks measured an average throughput of 3.06 Mbps, 128% faster than 3G, and yet the two types of networks had nearly identical bandwidth variability ratings, indicating that 4G does not address the underlying issues associated with QoD.
Faster Throughput, Variable Experience – Singapore had the fastest average throughput for both cellular (3.55 Mbps) and Wi-Fi (4.33 Mbps) networks, but also very high bandwidth variability rates that were second only to India. (Notably, all of the countries and regions tested by Kwicr had CVs in excess of 1 showing that even on the best networks users regularly experience bad mobile app sessions.)
Packets Getting Lost Globally – On a global basis, 56% of Wi-Fi sessions and 35% of cellular sessions experience packet loss.Hong Kong had the highest rate for cellular and India for Wi-Fi.
Sean Welch, President and CEO of Kwicrricsson
This study proves throughput and latency are great for measuring the performance of wired networks, but they are misleading when measuring mobile broadband. With the unique data from our Mobile Delivery Network, mobile app owners can finally see where this extreme variability is affecting their app's performance and the overall user experience. Faster networks and more capacity are simply not enough.
