Why Mobile Operators Introduced Data Plans: An Analysis of Voice and Data Usage Patterns

Abstract

With the introduction of the data-oriented plan for LTE service, one may concerned with the background of the ISP’s policy in charging for LTE services. In this work we investigate the latest usage patterns of voice and data applications for customers over the current mobile network, via which we investigate why mobile operators introduced data-oriented plans. To be specific, we collected the real-field data for the volume of voice and data traffic from the LTE network before the dataoriented plans were introduced. From the collected data we compute the absolute volume as well as the proportion of voice and data applications. From these observations we infer mobile operators’ reasoning behind the decision to introduce dataoriented plans with unlimited voice calls over the mobile network.