In the last few years Indian telecom companies have been focusing on providing data services but their efforts have not been impressive.
According to a study conducted by Compuware, 58 per cent of Indians who participated in the poll said they wanted mobile web pages to load in less than three seconds. About 77 per cent of the top mobile sites take more than 5 seconds to load, says Compuware.
The research firm polled about 4,000 mobile phone users across the world, and their frustrations while surfing the web clearly showed in the results.
User expectations about how sites and apps should work on mobile devices are highest in China and India, and people in these countries will not hesitate to make their concerns known.
In the current situation, however, the makers of mobile sites need to be careful of the content they place on their pages. The pages need to be simple so that they load faster and users don’t go to a competitor’s website just because the page they initially want to access doesn’t load in time. The report does not paint a good picture of the mobile web, which is unexpected since the common perception is that users are switching to smartphones from feature phones so that they can access the web at any time.
There are numerous factors on which the load time of a web page depends, and load time may go on to increase with websites becoming more complicated in future. The home internet connection is likely to be faster than the mobile connection most of the time, and computers are more powerful than tablets or smartphones.
The situation will gradually change with the arrival of 4G networks as well as dual core processors in phones. 4G connections will offer higher connection speeds so that load times for mobile web pages will reduce considerably.
“We conducted this study as a follow on to our 2009 study that showed mobile users had high expectations, but the majority experienced poor mobile performance. Almost two years later user expectations for mobiles continue to increase, but companies are still not meeting mobile users’ needs for fast and reliable experiences,” said Steve Tack, chief technology officer of Compuware APM.
“Today, 77 per cent of top companies across multiple verticals have mobile page load times of five seconds or more, while mobile users are only willing to wait five seconds or less for a web page to load before leaving the site. Poor performance is preventing many companies from taking advantage of the opportunities being provided by increased mobile access.”
2G data speeds are slow while 3G data is comparatively faster, but the services are still being rolled out and users are experiencing some teething troubles. In some cases, when a user goes out of a 3G coverage area and into a 2G area, his phone crashes. Due to such problems, most users still prefer WiFi networks because of a smooth user experience, reliability, and of course pricing.