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BANGALORE: Consumers around the world are suffering from 'mobile service fatigue' according to a survey of 6800 mobile users.
According to SmartTrust's Mobile Trends Guide 2005/06, consumers are struggling to keep pace with the rapid deployment of new handset features and data services, as well as complex pricing structures and poor usability.
These problems have been compounded by growing instances of poor handset configuration. This, according to the mobile device management company SmartTrust, led to lower than expected usage rates for value-added services such as Multi Media Messaging (MMS) and mobile content downloads.
The survey, which was conducted for SmartTrust by market research company TNS, shows that just 43 percent of MMS-enabled handsets have ever been used to send an MMS.
"15 percent of users have had problems when trying to use their operator's MMS service," said the author of the Mobile Trends Guide, Tim De Luca-Smith, communications manager at SmartTrust.
"In a large percentage of cases, the service just didn't work because of poor handset configuration and network settings. There is a real need to make such services more intuitive and remove consumer concerns over reliability and pricing. We live in a plug and play society and today's mobile users expect services to work first time, every time. They don't want to be left wondering whether their message was actually delivered."
Services such as MMS and WAP have become hugely important to operators keen to raise ARPU (average revenue per user). However, the survey (which covers 15 countries) shows that data use is still limited outside of SMS and amongst prepaid users despite the heavy cost to operators in many countries of subsidizing feature-rich handsets.
"In many countries camera-phones are heavily subsidized by the mobile operators and they expect to get a return on this investment through MMS usage. Having subscribers bypass the mobile network and - as the survey has found - using email to share their photos defeats the notion that MMS is an immediate and viral means of sharing content. It's all about the user experience and the only way to overcome this consumer behavior is to make services easier to use - that's certainly a factor in the continued success of SMS," adds De Luca-Smith.
SMS remains the number one data service. Across all of Europe, and most of Asia, the number of subscribers using SMS at least once a week was over 80 percent (global average 72%). Only in the USA was use of the service low with just 15 percent consumers with compatible handsets admitting to using the service. The penetration of cheap ADSL connections is largely blamed for lower than average use of all data services in the region.
The survey does, however, show reasons to be optimistic. 72 percent of all consumers reporting problems when using MMS stated that they would use the service more if their technical problems were overcome.
Mobile music has also captured the attention of consumers, even more so than mobile games, which have, over the past two years, attracted significant interest and investment across the industry. Following the success of portable music devices and services on the fixed Internet there was an overwhelming desire amongst consumers to use their handsets to download and listen to music tracks. Only in India and China were games considered a more attractive mobile service than music. Across Europe, 40 percent of mobile users expressed an interest in using mobile music services more. In Asia the figure was 38 percent but dropped to 20 percent in the USA.
The SmartTrust Mobile Trends Guide 2005/06 covers 6800 consumers in 15 countries (UK, Sweden, Germany, Netherlands, France, Russia, USA, Brazil, India, China, Hong Kong, Japan, Korea, Australia and New Zealand).
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