Submitted by Mike Grenville on Tue, 21 Feb 2006 16:32

A survey conducted at 3GSM found once again that the industry does not drink its own Kool Aid and actually use the services it promotes. For example only 24% of people surveyed at the show use their mobile phone to browse the internet.

The survey mobile services convergence company Tatara Systems of over one hundred mobile professionals highlights a number of surprising results. Tatara reckon that the results will greatly benefit forward-thinking mobile network operators searching for innovative ways to package and sell mobile data services.

The survey found that only a small percentage (9% and 4% respectively) of cellular data subscribers surveyed relied on UMTS or HSDPA for mobile data collection, with a massive 85% relying on 2.5G technology in the form of GPRS for cellular mobile data

Nearly 93% of respondents use other networks beyond cellular mobile data with 43% citing the need for higher performance, 30% stating coverage issues, and 20% saying cellular mobile data was too expensive as the reasons for selecting other networks for sessions.

Basic messaging applications remain by far the most popular: SMS (89%) and email (53%) with less than a quarter of respondents (24%) currently browse the Internet on the move. Mobile multimedia services are slow on the uptake: VoIP 18%, Video 13%, TV 6%

Mobile and laptop users that did not subscribe to a mobile data service either thought that they didn’t need it (27%), or just believed existing services were too expensive (12%)

Overall just 57% of mobile data users are satisfied with their current cellular mobile data connections

Opportunity To Improve

Tatara Systems believes there is an enormous market opportunity available for any mobile network operators capable of delivering seamless, efficient, powerful, stable and entertaining data applications to this growing community of early adopting end users.

Paul Crann, vice president of marketing for Tatara Systems said, “As operators continue to see increasing competitive pressures, it is vital that they differentiate by offering the best user experience possible to their customers. Increasing customer satisfaction involves fulfilling customer expectations with optimised performance and the ability to deliver a consistent user experience across networks and devices. Delivering the best service starts with allowing users to select the highest performance network and/ or the least cost routing options.”

“Once you step beyond coverage and speeds and feeds, operator success in this lucrative converged mobile services market will be a function of who can provide the best end-user experience,” said Steve Nicolle, president and CEO of Tatara Systems.