Technoeconomic performance of wireless networks supporting smart mobile devices and services: Evaluation of technology-centric cum marketing performance indicators

The scope of this study is to evolve a rational strategy to prescribe a performance measure on the prevailing mobile services and platforms that support emerging smart devices concurrent to traditional incumbents of feature cell phones. It is a motivated effort to judiciously include the economics-related parameters in conjunction with technology-specific details so as to deduce a cohesive performance metric in order to compare the state-of-the-art mobile services and related operations. In relevantly existing strategies, such performance comparison of mobile services is done purely on the basis of technology-dictated parameters on the speed of wireless traffic (in bps). The so-called PCMag.com assessments prescribe thereof, a mobile speed index (MSI) to determine the performance of mobile networks and identify the ”fastest network” that prevails in a service area. However, while deducing such MSI values, the approach pursued does not include any underlying economics-related facts relevant to service areas and/or periods of assessment. Hence, the present study is done to elucidate a coherently viable, technology-cum-economics based performance metric on mobile services in vogue. A technoeconomic parameter is identified thereof, and it is termed as relative technoeconomic performance index (RTPI); hence, a comprehensive comparison is furnished on the MSI values (of PCMag.com) versus the RTPI values pertinent to set of available data. Concluding remarks on the pros and cons of adopting ‘technology-alone’ details ( sans economics parameters) in decision-making on relative performance of mobile services (especially in the contexts of supporting smart- and feature-devices) are presented.