By Vikas Trehan

Whether mobile service providers are operating in developed or developing markets, they face the common challenge of managing the inevitable demand for increased bandwidth and the expectation of a flawless end-user experience.

Take, for example, the experience of one carrier that recently came to our attention. While evaluating innovative go-to-market campaigns to balance network usage and maximize revenues, they experienced various anomalies surrounding bandwidth capacity and deterioration of customer experience. A campaign to offer “best value” mobile data access rates in the evening backfired when bandwidth consumption rocketed and virtually brought the network to a standstill. The detrimental effect on regular subscribers was that they actually didn’t get close to the “all you can eat” expectation, and perhaps more importantly, their business customers experienced a reduced quality of their premium services.

What the carrier really needed was to proactively identify the potential variations in bandwidth consumption based on trend, geography, demographic and time-of-day, leveraging performance intelligence from the many domains of the mobile infrastructure plus awareness of the subscriber-application connectivity, usage, and performance experience.

Mobile service providers must address a host of operational challenges in order to achieve the high levels of quality of experience (QoE) that prevent subscriber dissatisfaction and churn. Typically, these challenges require: