Mobile Entertainment & Download Speed

(Via The Feature) Mobile entertainment isn't entertaining if you have to wait for it. Some smart operators have figured this out and are turbo-charging their content with the help of new technologies that allow users to breeze through portal navigation and downloads. A network needs to deliver a compelling end-user experiencefaster than it currently is. But the bottleneck isn't the available bandwidth; it's the inherent characteristics of networks. Mobile data networks reuse wireless communication protocols to achieve interoperability between mobile and fixed Internet domains. However, these protocols were not designed to perform efficiently in the mobile domain - where bandwidth is scarce, latency is high and network conditions fluctuate. M:Metrics, a company that measures subscriber consumption of mobile content and applications, has found a serious disconnect between user enthusiasm for gaming and actual downloads to the phone.

A recent field study undertaken by Israel's Flash Networks shows that a 2-3 step portal navigation process can take up to a minute over GPRS and even 3G, as sending a typical 30-kilobit page over a UMTS 384 kilobit per second link should take less than a second. However, the chatty nature of the download process means it takes tens of seconds per page. "As long as the download process is fragmented, the user experience will remain slow and frustrating."