Users´ reaction to network quality during web browsing on smartphones

Understanding the Quality of Experience (QoE) of users is important for network and service providers. Many researches of QoE have been reported where subjective analysis, e.g. in the form of Mean Opinion Score (MOS), for audio/video applications and data services are performed. These studies mainly focus on how users feel while using such applications. In this paper, we focus on how users behave and react to communication network quality. We analyze the telecom traffic of smartphones passively monitored from 3G mobile network and show the effect of network quality on the users´ web behavior. In particular, we investigate user behavior as a series of multiple actions in a flow of web browsing. We show that the observed results coincide with the MOS obtained through subjective analysis: The condition of network quality where the users´ web behavior changes matches with the condition where the MOS starts to degrade. In addition, the obtained results illustrate that the users perform various reactive actions depending on the perceived network quality. Specifically, users generate more web traffic and transactions when the qualities of the network are both good and poor.