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Mobile Broadband Performance Expectations Higher Than Ever

John Reister

The importance of mobile Internet performance for smartphone owners is increasing, with expectations at an all-time high, according to Vasona Network’s annual survey of smartphone owners.

At the same time, there is a trend of gradually increasing satisfaction with the performance of mobile data services, and more consumers are inclined to recommend their provider. While perception of mobile data performance improves, simultaneous trends of data plan upgrades point to constantly moving targets for wireless carriers to continue meeting expectations.

According to the survey:

■ The importance of mobile Internet performance when choosing a service provider rose again from 32% in 2014 to 35% this year

■ Users expecting “good mobile data performance all of the time, with no temporary hiccups or outages” remains high at 73% versus 72% last year

■ 32% of smartphone owners have upgraded their mobile data plans during the past year, with an additional 10% planning to do so within the next year.

While the importance of mobile Internet performance to smartphone owners continues rising, survey results indicate more satisfaction along these lines:

■ 35% of respondents believe that their provider offers the best mobile broadband performance available, up from 31% last year

■ 46% would recommend switching to their provider, up from 42% last year

■ 28% now think that they can get better performance by switching, down from 32% last year

■ 32% say that the mobile broadband experience offered by their provider has gotten better during the past year, while only 15% think that it has gotten worse

Mobile operators have made good headway in efforts to deliver solid data experiences. This positive trend is notable, but with one third of smartphone owners recently upgrading plans and more planning to do so soon, it remains important that carriers innovate with technologies that are responsive to rising demand and able to efficiently utilize available spectrum.

Additional findings from the survey suggest that operators should focus on improving mobile browsing performance. A majority of respondents (60%) say that “web pages loading slowly or not at all” is the single most frustrating experience when networks are slow. This is up from 54% last year. And when apps don’t work, operators still get the most blame at 56%, which is more than app makers, device manufacturers or OS developers combined.

John Reister is VP of Marketing and Product Management for Vasona Networks.


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Mobile Broadband Performance Expectations Higher Than Ever

John Reister

The importance of mobile Internet performance for smartphone owners is increasing, with expectations at an all-time high, according to Vasona Network’s annual survey of smartphone owners.

At the same time, there is a trend of gradually increasing satisfaction with the performance of mobile data services, and more consumers are inclined to recommend their provider. While perception of mobile data performance improves, simultaneous trends of data plan upgrades point to constantly moving targets for wireless carriers to continue meeting expectations.

According to the survey:

■ The importance of mobile Internet performance when choosing a service provider rose again from 32% in 2014 to 35% this year

■ Users expecting “good mobile data performance all of the time, with no temporary hiccups or outages” remains high at 73% versus 72% last year

■ 32% of smartphone owners have upgraded their mobile data plans during the past year, with an additional 10% planning to do so within the next year.

While the importance of mobile Internet performance to smartphone owners continues rising, survey results indicate more satisfaction along these lines:

■ 35% of respondents believe that their provider offers the best mobile broadband performance available, up from 31% last year

■ 46% would recommend switching to their provider, up from 42% last year

■ 28% now think that they can get better performance by switching, down from 32% last year

■ 32% say that the mobile broadband experience offered by their provider has gotten better during the past year, while only 15% think that it has gotten worse

Mobile operators have made good headway in efforts to deliver solid data experiences. This positive trend is notable, but with one third of smartphone owners recently upgrading plans and more planning to do so soon, it remains important that carriers innovate with technologies that are responsive to rising demand and able to efficiently utilize available spectrum.

Additional findings from the survey suggest that operators should focus on improving mobile browsing performance. A majority of respondents (60%) say that “web pages loading slowly or not at all” is the single most frustrating experience when networks are slow. This is up from 54% last year. And when apps don’t work, operators still get the most blame at 56%, which is more than app makers, device manufacturers or OS developers combined.

John Reister is VP of Marketing and Product Management for Vasona Networks.


Hot Topics

The Latest

Enterprises today operate in a real-time environment where uninterrupted access to trusted data has become a baseline expectation for users, applications and automated systems. Traditional DataOps models, built on manual effort and human triage, cannot keep pace with this always active demand. AI agents are emerging as the operational backbone, ensuring consistent data availability, reinforcing trustworthiness and enabling a level of scale that manual processes cannot achieve ...

For decades, trust in the digital workplace rested on familiar signals. We trusted faces on video calls, voices on the phone, and emails that appeared to come from people we knew. These cues felt human and intuitive. They anchored how decisions were made, approvals were granted, and access was authorized. AI-powered deepfakes have quietly broken that model ...

Cloud migration was supposed to be a one-way door. For most enterprises, it turns out it isn't. Cloud data repatriation is a real and growing trend. A new survey ... finds that 89% of organizations plan to expand their on-premises infrastructure footprint over the next two years — and 75% have already moved at least some workloads back from public cloud in the past 24 months. The findings point to a broad rethinking of where data belongs ...

Over the past few years, large language models (LLMs) have revolutionized the software industry. Given their ability to excel at multi-step reasoning, LLMs have helped enterprises streamline workflows and adapt to the unknown. However, employing such models comes with sky-high costs, latency issues, and limited flexibility. In the realm of IT operations, it is generally wiser to employ smaller, domain-specific models instead ...

For years, DevOps teams operated under a simple assumption: collect enough telemetry, and you can find and fix any problem. That assumption is breaking down. Modern enterprises now operate across microservices, hybrid cloud environments, APIs, Kubernetes, and highly automated delivery pipelines. Releases happen continuously, dependencies shift constantly, and failures spread faster than teams can diagnose them ...

New Relic surveyed IT and engineering leaders from the media and entertainment (M&E) sector to understand what's working — and where challenges persist with their observability practices. The findings reveal how M&E organizations are navigating rising platform complexity, audience expectations, and AI-driven change. Below are five takeaways that stand out ...

Let me start with something I've seen play out more times than I can count. A team hits a wall with the cloud. Costs creep up, then spike. Performance starts to feel inconsistent. Someone in finance asks a simple question like "why did this double?" and nobody has a clean answer ... Maybe this isn't the right place for everything. That realization feels like a breakthrough, like you've identified the problem. In reality, you've just identified the starting line ...

In MEAN TIME TO INSIGHT Episode 24, Shamus McGillicuddy, VP of Research, Network Infrastructure and Operations, at EMA discusses network observability tool sprawl ... 

In cloud-native systems, scaling is often as simple as moving a slider. For on-premise databases, the stakes are different. Over-provisioning hardware is expensive. Under-provisioning leads to performance bottlenecks that are difficult to fix once the equipment is in the rack ...

When most people think about cybersecurity, they picture firewalls, encryption, and access controls — technical tools designed to protect systems and data. But beneath the technology lies a deeper set of principles about trust, decision-making, and resilience ... The best leaders don't eliminate risk. They manage it intelligently. And in many ways, cybersecurity offers a surprisingly useful playbook for doing exactly that ...