Today’s publication of our annual Global Internet Phenomena Report reveals a number of interesting trends in application usage and growth and outlines some unique challenges for the telecom industry. As the recognized authoritative source for global internet usage and trend data, the Report shows that the sudden growth in internet application traffic that began in 2020 with COVID lockdowns is continuing to drive and disrupt the telecom industry.
Combine that traffic growth with the rapid increase in the popularity of applications, the number applications, and the complexity of those applications, and you have a perfect storm of challenges for service providers.
Applications today are more diverse, more complex, and carry more types of content than ever before. And they’re more critical to our everyday lives than ever before. Between work applications like Zoom, social applications like Facebook, and entertainment applications like Netflix, the average consumer can spend up to eight hours a day on various internet applications.
This heightened level of dependency on applications is driving a heightened level of sensitivity to application quality of experience (App QoE). What may have been a satisfactory internet experience prior to COVID is no longer acceptable. And right or wrong, this perception lands at the feet of the service provider. How a customer experiences an application is how a customer perceives the provider.
All of these recent trends are driving the telecom industry to an inflection point. While application vendors like Netflix, Amazon, and others can raise prices to cover application costs, the service providers that deliver those applications cannot. Absent regulatory relief, service providers are forced to seek new ways to optimize and monetize their networks.
In today’s economy, service providers cannot afford to simply throw bandwidth at the problem anymore. Building bigger pipes everywhere is no longer the answer. For service providers to ensure customer satisfaction while keeping costs manageable, they must effectively tap into their own network intelligence to identify and rectify network issues before they become customer issues.
Further, service providers need to get ahead of these problems to accurately identify potential network weaknesses and plan proactively to address.
Lastly, service providers should look at what their networks are telling them in terms of customer usage patterns and trends so that they can develop new products and services that will create new revenue streams.
As the App QoE Company, Sandvine offers solutions that enable service provider to quickly and easily analyze, optimize and monetize their networks.
To learn more about the 2023 Global Internet Phenomena Report and what it means for your network and your business, plan to visit us at Mobile World Congress. Click here to schedule a meeting with one of our executives or subject matter experts.