Looking for more cost-effective ways of controlling bandwidth while ensuring that customers get the best mobile experience and buy more data services is a tough balancing act. Many of the most popular applications using monthly data allocation or pre-pay credit are the ones that are most draining on network resource.
Users often have more than 30 apps on their phone. Some they use a lot, others less so, and there will be some that have never been used. What most mobile customers don’t know is that many of these apps are consuming mobile bandwidth even when they’re not being used. And this is a problem that costs the average mobile operator several million dollars yearly.
This is caused by apps that are described as “chatty”–constantly signaling the mobile network several hundred times an hour to provide updates. At best, this overload in network signalling traffic can cause congestion and slow up speeds. At worst, it can cause networks to crash. In almost all cases network outages and performance collapses are avoidable and have been caused by too much app signaling traffic that isn’t necessary in the first place.
When apps are being developed, the use of an operator’s network is often way down the list of priorities for the app developer. They want to develop apps that are going to be most popular with customers, regardless of the amount of network resource the apps consume when they’re not being used and running in the background.
This unnecessary traffic also comes with a sting for users by draining smartphone batteries, which degrades the customer experience for the end user. Serious network outages not only cause headaches for the networks teams in operators. Customer service, sales and marketing teams are all placed under stress in the aftermath.
Last June, a leading UK operator managed to keep some customers relatively happy after a 17-hour network outage by giving each affected customer a 10% reduction on their next bill, or 10% bonus on their next pre-paid top up. In addition they also gave all customers a £10 voucher (about $16) for use in their stores. With media reports of “several hundred thousand” customers being affected, this is a fairly hefty compensation bill.
In Japan, a leading operator had a major network shutdown last January leading to a four-hour service outage. The operator’s senior management felt this strongly, with the company president and five other senior executives taking pay cuts between 10% and 20% for three months to show atonement for this network problem.
Network outages cost a lot to fix, and the cost often goes beyond spending money on additional network equipment.