Strategies for Mobile Broadband Growth: Traffic Segmentation for Better Customer Experience

With mobile terminals becoming the primary Internet devices for most of the people in the world and smartphone users generating on average 10 times more traffic than other users, it is critical that operators adopt smarter segmentation and pricing strategies. This paper analyzes how the deployment of QoS, with traffic segmentation by users and by services, may help service providers to achieve these objectives, save costs and go beyond the existing pricing models, while taking into account the new facets of mobile Internet usage patterns. In the analyzed cases, using the proposed QoS functions, simulation results for 3GPP High Speed Packet Access (HSPA) showed a spectral efficiency gain up to circa 30%; or, equivalently, a potential sites saving of about 22%, for serving the same amount of satisfied traffic on the best effort (BE) with capacity over provisioning. Extra benefits and better user experience are expected from the deployment of 3GPP HSPA+ and 3GPP Long Term Evolution (LTE) systems.