PCQuest 3G User Satisfaction Survey

There's a lot of excitement in the air ever since private telecom operators were allowed to sell the much awaited (and delayed!) 3G services to consumers. Looking at all this excitement, PCQuest decided to do a bit of investigation to find out whether the consumers share the same level of excitement, and just how satisfied are they with the 3G services being offered so far. For this, we surveyed 71 working professionals at managerial level (IT heads, other managers) to understand if they were using 3G, their satisfaction level with its performance, etc. We discovered that 75% of the respondents were already using 3G, while 22% were still clutching onto 2G. The remaining 3% were still in two minds. But the good thing is that whoever was not using 3G was planning to go for it in the near future.

Satisfaction with 3G speed

The biggest attraction of 3G is supposed to be high speed Internet access that it provides you while on the move. On being asked about the satisfaction level with speed provided by the service provider, the users gave a mixed response. 33% of the respondents found the speed to be average, while 28% found it to be excellent. Another 22% refrained from answering, while 17% felt dissatisfied.

Quality of Connectivity

Stability featured next on our priority list, considering that providing a high bandwidth won't be easy and minor malfunctions are imminent, if not frequent. 44% found the quality of connectivity moderately stable and cut off sometimes. 20% could not give any answer, 20% called it extremely stable and 16% ruled it unstable. This suggests that 3G service, being in its nascent stage, is still to cover a lot of ground as far as consistency in performance is concerned.

Ratings given by users on the basis of quality of 3G network and its cost

When asked to rate the quality of 3G network and the cost, more than half voted average for both. The quality was adjudged extremely good by 16%, poor by 16%, average by 47% and ignored by 21%. Regarding the cost, 22% called it very expensive, 45% average, 11% declared it very cost-effective and 22% gave no answers.

Primary Usage for 3G and Future Plans

We found that the primary use of 3G for now continues to remain email and web browsing, possibly due to the high costs. Another 45% said that they also used it for doing video calls, 49% did real-time music and video streaming, while another 36% used it for heavy uploads and downloads, and 17% used it for gaming.