The mobile industry is undergoing a fundamental shift, from a network-centric world to a device-centric world. In many cases, devices play a key role in driving sales, the need for network upgrades, and customer satisfaction. The bottom line is that some mobile carriers spend around $100 per customer per year on device subsidies, which can add up to a whopping $1 billion in cost for every 10 million subscribers. That’s why it’s critical to know how a device will perform before it hits the commercial marketplace—and before the thousands of consumers who just purchased the device become the de facto performance evaluators.

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In the mobile world, one of the most important criteria to measure is the reliability of the connection between the device and the network. By measuring clear parameters such as dropped calls before devices are released to the marketplace, and by being able to benchmark the performance of a particular device against the performance of devices already on the market, carriers and mobile device manufacturers can fully understand how a device will perform prior to its commercial launch.

Unfortunately, there has not been a reliable, cost-effective way to evaluate the real-world performance of devices prior to commercial launch. Evaluations of metrics such as dropped calls were historically based on “best guesses” made from data that was collected by making just a few hundred calls on a particular network. But thanks to new advances, engineers can now conduct statistically valid performance evaluations based upon real-world usage and enable performance comparisons across devices.

From a design perspective, this allows designers to baseline the performance of their devices against either a reference design or a competitive device and to make and evaluate revisions to the device’s design, all before the device hits the commercial marketplace. Not only do these performance evaluations result in fewer returned devices, they also produce a much better public relations situation for the mobile operator, whose network is almost always blamed for problems when in reality, the fault may lie in the device.

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Today’s comprehensive performance evaluation process goes way beyond just “compliance” testing to evaluate three key areas: the device’s ability to successfully initiate, receive, and maintain a standard phone call; performance in simultaneous voice and data operations, or multi-radio access bearer (multi-RAB) mode; and performance in a multi-generation (2G/3G) technology network.