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

This post is a follow-up to “The Speed of Light and Human Expectations”, in which we identified some factors that impact the time it takes to load a typical web page.

Two of those factors were latency from the client to the content servers and latency associated with DNS.  Various techniques have been implemented to reduce both these latency figures in practice.

Today, most things viewed online are served off a content delivery network (CDN), such as Akamai and Limelight Networks. These companies position content servers as close as possible to the ‘subscriber edge’ of the network (as close to your house as is possible), so that subscribers get a low-latency, high-bandwidth experience when consuming content served by the CDN’s customers.  This is generally a win-win-win-win scenario, with consumers getting better quality of experience, Internet providers experiencing lower transit (and happier customers), content owners delivering increased reliability, and the CDN provider getting paid.

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Users have certain expectations of products and services. If these expectations are met by some in the class, but not by others, then competitive forces reward the top performers. If the entire class fails to meet them, then the class fails or an innovator will subsequently disrupt the status quo.

With web pages, Internet users have an expectation that pages will load within a ‘reasonable’ amount of time. What is reasonable varies, but it is generally agreed that the sweet spot is somewhere under 3 seconds. A recent Akamai survey found that 47 percent of consumers expect a load time of less than 2 seconds. In fact, 40 percent of respondents indicated that they would leave a site if it takes longer than 3 seconds to load.

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