New consumer research published by YouGov and Acision again reinforces the Quality of Service (QoS) challenges operators are facing with their mobile broadband services today. The research, which questioned UK consumers about their mobile broadband experience found that, despite the rising popularity of mobile broadband, 84% had experienced Quality of Service issues. Slow speeds are amongst the most encountered problem (67%), poor network coverage (49%), inability to get connected (45%) and connection loss (40%).

Steven van Zanen, senior vice president marketing, mobile broadband, at Acision, said: "When reviewing the research, we identified three key areas where operators can deploy capabilities to raise QoS levels. The first one is defining fairness. When asked about the contentious issue of fair usage policies, 56% of research respondents were not aware if their operator had a fair usage policy in place and 71% were unaware that in many networks, 5% of users generate over 80 per cent of broadband traffic, causing slow download speeds and connection problems for all users. However, once aware of the issues surrounding the fair distribution of bandwidth, consumers responded positively to the option of allowing sophisticated fairness policies if this helped to improve the overall service."

The research demonstrated that almost three quarters of respondents (74%) showed their support of an active approach to fairness aimed at distributing bandwidth between as many people as possible to ease congestion to benefit all users. Some respondents even agreed they would be happy to pay a small fee for this if it meant a better broadband service (49%).

"Content optimisation is a second area where operators can improve user experience," said van Zanen. "While video is becoming increasingly popular, with over a third of consumers questioned (36%) accessing the data-hungry video sites via their mobile connection, the research highlighted that the quality of video services across mobile broadband performed particularly badly on a frequent basis."

For example, the research highlighted that of those consumers accessing video services, over half (63%) of consumers experienced frequent pauses and, as many as 55% of video users experienced these problems on a regular basis. With video playback causing consumers problems, 48% agreed that they would be happy for their mobile operator to apply content adaptation policies such as reducing the size of videos being watched, if that ensured the video would playback without stalling/buffering and they were not able to see a difference in the video being played.