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New Benchmarks Find that Mobile Web Sites are 30 Percent Slower than PC Websites

Today, Gomez, Inc., the leader¹ in web application experience management and web performance benchmarking, and dotMobi, the company behind the .mobi Internet domain for identifying content that works on mobile phones, launched the world's first comprehensive benchmarks to compare and rank the mobile Web experience provided by the top businesses in the airline, banking and search industries.

Mobile device use is rapidly growing and mobile Web applications and sites offer unprecedented convenience for end-users, however they do not yet match performance levels of "traditional" Web applications. To help content providers address such issues, Gomez and dotMobi are testing five critical aspects of mobile Web experience — readiness, discoverability, speed, success and consistency — and publishing the results as monthly Mobile Web Experience Benchmarks. The first results find that mobile Web sites are 30 percent slower when compared to computer-based Web browsing.

The Mobile Web Experience Benchmarks highlight how major brands address the challenge of delivering quality Web experiences to consumers who access information via the mobile Web. The benchmarks will help everyday users better understand the mobile experiences delivered by the brands they use for travel, online banking and search. Benchmarked businesses will learn how well they perform on the mobile Web relative to their competitors. And for corporate mobile teams — including application development, operations and e-business professionals — the benchmarks provide a barometer to test and monitor their own mobile Web performance.

Benchmark data for each industry — airline, banking and search — is available at:

• http://www.gomez.com/products/mobile_airlines_benchmark.php
• http://www.gomez.com/products/mobile_banking_benchmark.php
• http://www.gomez.com/products/mobile_search_benchmark.php
• and in Aviation Week, American Banker and Search Engine Land magazines.

"Five dimension" approach to mobile Web experience benchmarking

Gomez has combined its industry-leading web experience measurement methodology for the "traditional," PC-based Web with tools from dotMobi to create unique benchmarks that test mobile Web performance across major wireless networks. The benchmarks test these five core metrics:

• Discoverability – how readily a consumer can find the mobile Web site using different URLs.
• Readiness – how well the mobile Web site renders on popular mobile devices.
• Availability – the percentage of successful transactions or the availability of a Web page.
• Response time – how long each page takes to download and the duration of an entire transaction.
• Consistency – how well the mobile Web site performs on different mobile carriers, in different geographies and time frames.

"End-users expect great Web experiences, whether accessing the Internet from a mobile device or a desktop computer. However, Gomez's new benchmarks indicate that the mobile Web has some catching up to do in order to meet end-users' expectations," said Matt Poepsel, Gomez's VP of Performance Strategies. "Applying a universal benchmarking methodology makes the most sense. It helps businesses baseline and improve their mobile Web performance so that, over time, they can deliver quality online experiences to all consumers — no matter how they access the Web."

"As dotMobi announced in a recent study, there are now more than 1.1 million Web sites designed for mobile users, and that number is continuing to grow at a incredibly fast pace. Helping consumers better understand which of those sites will offer them a good experience — no matter what handset or operator they're using — will help increase the use of the mobile Web," said Trey Harvin, CEO of dotMobi. "Benchmarking allows businesses to see their sites in relation to the sites of their industry peers, which will also help drive the creation of more good sites for consumers to use."

The disparity of performance between "traditional" Web applications and mobile Web applications, as highlighted by the new Gomez/dotMobi benchmarks, underscores the need for tools that can help organizations optimize the quality of their customers' mobile Web experiences. In a related announcement, Gomez today announced new capabilities for testing, monitoring and benchmarking the performance of mobile Web sites, mobile applications and SMS services. For more information see "Gomez Expands Web Experience Management Suite to Encompass Mobile Web Sites & Applications”.

About Gomez
Gomez, Inc. is the leading provider of web application experience management services, which businesses use to test their web applications while in development and to monitor their web applications after deployment. More than 2,500 customers use Gomez's on-demand services to improve the quality of the web experience in order to increase their revenue from web applications, reduce their operating costs, and extend their brand reputations. For more information, please visit www.gomez.com.

Follow Gomez on Twitter: @Gomez_Inc
Connect with Gomez on Facebook
Join the Gomez User Group on LinkedIn

About dotMobi
Headquartered in Dublin, dotMobi is a worldwide leader in enabling the development & discovery of quality mobile content through innovative services, helping businesses and individuals reach the world's billions of mobile phone users. dotMobi spurs mobile industry innovation by giving content providers the tools they need to ensure the Web will work on mobile phones with speed, accuracy and relevant content.

dotMobi is backed by leading mobile operators, network & device manufacturers, and Internet content providers, including Ericsson, GSM Association, Hutchison 3, Microsoft, Nokia, Orascom Telecom, Samsung Electronics, Syniverse, T-Mobile, Telefónica Móviles, Telecom Italia Mobile (TIM), Visa and Vodafone.

¹ Forrester Research "Tech Horizons: Evaluating Gomez Web Experience Management Services: Management-On-Demand for Web 2.0 Applications," August 2008

Gomez and gomez.com are registered service marks, and Mobile Web Experience Benchmarks is a service mark, of Gomez, Inc. All other trademarks and service marks are the property of their respective owners.

About dotMobi

Headquartered in Dublin, dotMobi - a wholly owned subsidiary of Afilias Limited - is a worldwide leader in enabling the development & discovery of quality mobile content through innovative services, in turn helping businesses and individuals reach the world's billions of mobile phone users. dotMobi spurs mobile industry innovation by giving content providers the tools they need to ensure the Web will work on mobile phones with speed, accuracy and relevant content. (Learn More)

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