U.S. vs. China: Mobile Network Reliability
The World Bank announced recently that China will become the World’s largest economy later this year, surpassing the United States. For the first time since the late eighteen hundreds the U.S. will not be the richest economy. With this changing of the guard mobile developers might consider launching more apps in China. Before doing so developers should be aware of differences that exist between the countries.
In this report we study one important difference, the reliability of cellular networks in these countries. We analyzed 1.02 billion network connections made April 2014 from an app that’s used around the World. We then compared network error rates in China vs. the U.S., plus other rich countries.
4x More Network Errors in China vs. U.S.
Based on the above graph China has about 4 times more network errors compared to the U.S. (3.86% vs. 0.99%). The second worst among the 10 richest countries is India at 2.17%. It is also the second most populous country after China. Among the top 10 Japan has the most reliable network with just a 0.76% error rate, followed by Germany with a 0.83% error rate.
Most Reliable Networks in Switzerland and Holland
Looking at the 11-20 richest countries it’s clear none of these have the level of network errors that China does. In fact out of the top 20 richest countries the ones with the most reliable networks are Switzerland with just 0.55% errors followed by Holland with 0.59% errors. As was in the first batch, the county with the largest population in the second batch has the highest error rate, that is Indonesia at a 2.11%. Indonesia is the 4th most populated country after China, India, and the United States.
Network Errors Mostly Tied to a Country’s Infrastructure
Of the network errors that were analyzed:
- about 90% relate to the phone’s network connection being on but not reaching the server (e.g. due to a timed out connection or no connection established)
- about 10% relate to a configuration issue (e.g. phone’s network being off, international roaming being turned off, or the hostname not being found)
This varies slightly per country, for example in the U.S. the configuration issues is at 13.6% and in China it’s at 9.6%.
So with about 90% of errors in the study relating to a non-existent or weak connection, and not a configuration issue, these errors could be greatly diminished with improved infrastructure within individual countries.
Summary
As mobile developers target their apps at China, and other rich heavily populated countries like India and Indonesia, it is important to recognize that their networks are more error prone and to make the proper adjustments.
For example developers an cache more previously downloaded data, cache data before it is requested (while being sensitive to regional data plan costs), or add non-data dependent app functionality.
