Broadband Service Providers (BSPs) are due to improve their customer satisfaction thanks to a new project that is providing them with the tools to more accurately assess the end-user experience with the applications they use.
While known performance metrics can be used to spot issues such as network degradation, currently there is no standardised method to quantify the quality of service as experienced by the user.
The project, ‘Service Types, QoE Parameters and Evaluation’ (WT-524), run bny the Broadband Forum, will provide new parameters and methods for BSPs to automatically measure customers’ Quality of Experience (QoE). It will aim to use artificial intelligence (AI) to enhance the application of existing measurements – for bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss – to specific services.
“As users increasingly use more advanced and real-time services, it is even more important that BSPs know the true quality of the services they deliver in order to improve their service delivery, enhance customer satisfaction, increase service take-up rates, and reduce churn,” said Manuel Paul, President of the Broadband Forum and Director of the Service Requirements Work Area. “The most reliable measurement of the perceived broadband experience is the user’s subjective evaluation and these approaches are not feasible for the BSP to overcome real-time issues. This new project from the Broadband Forum will ultimately provide BSPs with a way to accurately estimate the service quality their customers experience in a more efficient way.”
The baseline methods and models for estimating end-user QoE will be based on Broadband Forum’s existing services-led efforts, as well as work in other standards development organisations, such as the IETF and ITU-T. The project will bring together QoE indicators and algorithms fragmented across many different industry specifications to create a ‘one stop shop’ for all things QoE that can be readily used by a BSP.
“To deliver the end-users’ perceived experience in an evolving landscape of new applications and use cases, it is important that the BSP can be more dynamic and offer service-aware and application-appropriate solutions depending on the service or application in use,” added Craig Thomas, CEO, Broadband Forum. “The user’s service requirements must be known to improve service delivery, making it even more important for industry collaboration to share real-world broadband challenges and align on evolving industry priorities. Broadband Forum’s latest project is paving the way to make this services-led broadband approach a reality for BSPs.”
The project will aim to estimate QoE for each ‘quality layer’ to provide a structured approach to understanding and improving the user’s overall experience with a service or application. This includes content quality (such as picture quality), transaction quality (such as service ordering and maintenance), and flow and network quality (basic network performance).
Key discussions on real-world challenges and end-user requirements from leading players – from Broadband Forum’s recent Town Hall Innovation Series and Service Provider Action Council (SPAC) sessions – will flow directly into the project. This includes work on Quality of Outcome (QoO) that helps estimate the way an application is expected to behave and will deliver an objective network quality score that the user can understand and trust.
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