"The increasing popularity of smartphones is threatening mobile operator profitability, new research from WDSGlobal has found. A combination of expensive subsidies, fixed data tariffs, complex service set-up and a high cost-to-support mean it can now take up to 16 months just for carriers to break-even on a subscriber.
The WDSGlobal research found consumers are increasingly looking to connect their smartphones to their internet, email and social networking accounts out-of-the-box. However, problems in setting up these more complex data services on smartphones means that, on average, smartphone support transactions take 30% longer to resolve than featurephone transactions."
