With Mobile World Congress just past and the International CTIA Wireless show up in a couple of weeks there’s been lots of buzz around the explosion of mobile data. Its left me considering what it is that connects me to life when I’m remote from my home or office; what are the applications I most value on the go? And, what’s the one application that, trapped on an island, I just can’t do without? Well, assuming 911 was available to me the next one on my list would be email. In asking others, I was interested to find a variety of island apps near and dear to people’s hearts. I got everything from “life without YouTube would be unbearable” to “I couldn’t go a week without tweeting”.  I’d like to ask the Better Broadband blog readers…”What’s your island app?”. If you will – click here to respond and I’ll share the results next week in a follow-up post. [Vote for your Island App]

The term “Quality of Experience” (also known as QoE) pops up a great deal in the telecommunications space.  Most generally, it can be defined as a subjective measure of a service or product.  Note that this definition distinguishes from QoE from its close relative Quality of Service (QoS). QoS is an objective measure of a set of quality requirements, and typically has a network view, whereas when service providers speak of QoE they are usually talking in terms of the quality perceived by the end user.

We’ve already talked about subscriber expectations regarding web page load times on broadband connections.  However, consider a subscriber’s expectation of a web page load time on a dial-up connection, or on free Wifi, or on a mobile handset.  Most subscribers would expect the load time to vary across these technologies.  Now, what if instead of talking about a web page, we examine streaming video, or voice-over-IP, or downloading a movie file…would the expectations be consistent?  And here we find the biggest challenge in measuring Quality of Experience – expectations change based on technology, application, and subscriber.

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I recently sat down with Tara Seals, Senior Editor of Billing World & OSS magazine to discuss how the surge in broadband consumption is driving network operators towards new economic models based on the subscriber experience—primarily their perceived value of having a choice of how they use their bandwidth for activities that matter most to them such as VoIP, file transfer and gaming.

Tara and I discussed the concept of “better broadband” and what that means for subscribers, operators and the network overall.

To view the article visit:

http://www.xchangemag.com/articles/billing-better-broadband.html