Smartphone users mobile networks quality provision and VoLTE intend: Six-months field study

The emerging interactive mobile applications rely the effectiveness of their delivery and their users quality of experience (QoS) on the performance of the underlying heterogeneous networking infrastructures, i.e., their quality of service (QoS). However, the performance that the users will be provided with is a priori unknown, depending on their specific context (e.g., location, time, operator). Moreover, some interactive applications require a particular QoS to be provided, in order to assure their users QoE, e.g., a conversational voice (VoIP) and video-session requires Round Trip Time (RTT) a no higher than 150 ms. In this paper we report the results from a six-months field study involving 15 users of three Swiss network operators where we quantified their networks QoS and context on a minute basis. We then analyse the duration of time intervals and context in which the users are provided with `VoIP-friendly RTT', thus emulating VoLTE. On average, in daily life environments, a mobile user would be able to use a VoIP for 8 minutes for all operators and would need to wait for 3 minutes in between the calls. These numbers reduce to 2-3 minutes each while user is a highly mobile state; only 20% of the VoIP calls over 3G/4G would be able to last 19 minutes. We discuss the implications for mobile network operators focusing on their intend for the deployment of VoLTE services, implications for users themselves, as well as implications for service providers striving to maximise users interactive mobile applications experience.