Forget about fancy features and accessories. Consumers are looking for a better quality experience from their mobile phones, according to a new study. And they’re willing to pay for the improvement.

From June to November 2010, Acision commissioned a number of independent market research agencies (YouGov, Quantinet and Toluna) to conduct a detailed survey to understand consumer perceptions of mobile broadband in the UK, United States, Brazil, Singapore and Australia. 

The result: 63 percent of global consumers would be willing to pay more for better telecommunications services. In fact, a whopping 79 percent of respondents reported suffering issues of some kind including slow speeds (62 percent), network coverage issues (39 percent) and connection drops (36 percent). Seventy-four percent of video consumers are stating regular issues like frequent pausing and long waiting times. Worldwide this is driving a churn potential of 31 percent which is nearly equivalent in all countries.

“Operators are already doing all they can to expand bandwidth but our research shows that some of the QoE issues are intrinsic even in best practice networks,” said Steven van Zanen, Acision’s senior vice president of Marketing, Mobile Data Control, in a press release. “A further investment in capability is required to reach to the next stage of mobile broadband evolution.”

To address challenges and boost revenue opportunities, Acision recommends improvements in three areas:

Data layer: High performance and reliable components that handle network traffic;

Content layer: Best-in-class components which are able to optimize specific content services such as video or browsing;

Control layer: Highly intelligent components which enable real-time, complex and rich decision-making.

“Operators will then need to develop rich service offerings to address individual consumer requirements and support paid-for optimized or premium services, delivered via a bundle or transaction-based offering that consumers both understand and can relate to,” concluded van Zanen.