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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 are under pressure to scale AI quickly. Yet despite considerable investment, adoption continues to stall. One of the most overlooked reasons is vendor sprawl ... In reality, no organization deliberately sets out to create sprawling vendor ecosystems. More often, complexity accumulates over time through well-intentioned initiatives, such as enterprise-wide digital transformation efforts, point solutions, or decentralized sourcing strategies ...

Nearly every conversation about AI eventually circles back to compute. GPUs dominate the headlines while cloud platforms compete for workloads and model benchmarks drive investment decisions. But underneath that noise, a quieter infrastructure challenge is taking shape. The real bottleneck in enterprise AI is not processing power, it is the ability to store, manage and retrieve the relentless volumes of data that AI systems generate, consume and multiply ...

The 2026 Observability Survey from Grafana Labs paints a vivid picture of an industry maturing fast, where AI is welcomed with careful conditions, SaaS economics are reshaping spending decisions, complexity remains a defining challenge, and open standards continue to underpin it all ...

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In the modern enterprise, the conversation around AI has moved past skepticism toward a stage of active adoption. According to our 2026 State of IT Trends Report: The Human Side of Autonomous AI, nearly 90% of IT professionals view AI as a net positive, and this optimism is well-founded. We are seeing agentic AI move beyond simple automation to actively streamlining complex data insights and eliminating the manual toil that has long hindered innovation. However, as we integrate these autonomous agents into our ecosystems, the fundamental DNA of the IT role is evolving ...

AI workloads require an enormous amount of computing power ... What's also becoming abundantly clear is just how quickly AI's computing needs are leading to enterprise systems failure. According to Cockroach Labs' State of AI Infrastructure 2026 report, enterprise systems are much closer to failure than their organizations realize. The report ... suggests AI scale could cause widespread failures in as little as one year — making it a clear risk for business performance and reliability.

The quietest week your engineering team has ever had might also be its best. No alarms going off. No escalations. No frantic Teams or Slack threads at 2 a.m. Everything humming along exactly as it should. And somewhere in a leadership meeting, someone looks at the metrics dashboard, sees a flat line of incidents and says: "Seems like things are pretty calm over there. Do we really need all those people?" ... I've spent many years in engineering, and this pattern keeps repeating ...

The gap is widening between what teams spend on observability tools and the value they receive amid surging data volumes and budget pressures, according to The Breaking Point for Observability Leaders, a report from Imply ...

Seamless shopping is a basic demand of today's boundaryless consumer — one with little patience for friction, limited tolerance for disconnected experiences and minimal hesitation in switching brands. Customers expect intuitive, highly personalized experiences and the ability to move effortlessly across physical and digital channels within the same journey. Failure to deliver can cost dearly ...

If your best engineers spend their days sorting tickets and resetting access, you are wasting talent. New global data shows that employees in the IT sector rank among the least motivated across industries. They're under a lot of pressure from many angles. Pressure to upskill and uncertainty around what agentic AI means for job security is creating anxiety. Meanwhile, these roles often function like an on-call job and require many repetitive tasks ...