It may sound inevitable that a summer of streaming live sports and festivals will put more demand on the home network. Whether watching Wimbledon tennis matches, Euros football finals, or live music, multiple devices are likely being used in households across Europe as friends and family members jostle to watch unmissable moments. These periods of peak data rates can have a knock-on effect on the rest of the network, potentially exposing Quality of Experience (QoE) frailties – especially for gamers, live streamers or video-calling home workers, for example.
But what needn’t be inevitable is for broadband users to suffer from a worse experience during those busy network periods. In today’s connected home, the barometers for QoE are not simply high speeds but latency, buffer or jitter. If service providers have access to accurate performance measurements and analysis of those variables, and even the ability to predict QoE, they can deliver experiences that make sure customers only need to debate which sport to watch, rather than who is taking up all the bandwidth.
Seamless streaming, with a touch of low latency
For the plethora of next-generation applications in the home, from augmented reality, virtual reality headsets, to multiple live 4k and 8k video streams and home working, high bandwidth is of course critical. However the view that a great user experience is only defined by how quickly they can access a service is misguided and a long outdated one. As new applications continue to get introduced into our homes, more customers will be exposed to the discomfort of poor latency.
So what’s all the fuss with latency? Latency is regarded as a key user experience bottleneck. In layman’s terms, latency is a measure of how much time it takes for a data packet from one point to another. In a perfect world, as the data packet traversing the network to our end-user devices, its latency would be as close to zero as possible. If there is too much latency, then applications might perform poorly and customer frustration will mount.
The external factors that affect latency are the time it takes for the packet to travel from two points, queuing caused by competing traffic, serialisation (the time it takes to add the packet’s contents onto a transmission channel) and packet processing time.
Bridging the knowledge gap
The likes of cloud gamers are acutely aware of the damage that high latency plays when it comes to their user experience and are willing to pay a premium for lower latency as it provides them with an experience that feels realistic. A Light Reading webinar poll indicated that more than half of latency aware users are willing to pay an additional $5-10 more a month for the appropriate, guaranteed low-latency experience.
But the average customer does not understand latency or realise what the benefits of low latency deliver. We need to explain what it means concisely so that the average consumer can understand. Latency on an application level and easy-to-understand metrics are needed.
A game-changer for latency measurement
Broadband Forum’s Broadband QED (Quality of Experience Delivered) project was established to define metrics that capture variability in network quality, relating directly to Application Outcome and end-user QoE. QED is a metric that builds a representative statistical distribution of latency and measures the round-trip time it takes for data packets to be sent over the network for a specified period of time or continuously.
The typical metrics for network quality do not capture Application Outcome sufficiently. This varies depending on how the latency is distributed. You can even have the same network bandwidth, average latency, jitter and packet loss, but still experience different quality depending on the application in use.
QED provides the framework to specify, measure and analyse the quality required for these connected home applications. It helps us predict outcomes of each application type, applying Machine Learning techniques to predict what the QoE will be. The framework uses Quality Attenuation (written ∆Q) to deliver improved performance measurements and analysis, tackling factors such as latency, consistency, predictability, and reliability.
The path to application-relevant QoE
A shift to services-led broadband is already underway, and network latency has to be a key consideration for service providers in the home to keep customer satisfaction and retention high. The user experience is no longer an afterthought.
By offering lower latency and guaranteeing an improved user experience, service providers can potentially unlock new revenue streams. An end-to-end connection across the network directly to the end-user device can enable service providers to offer differentiated and application-relevant QoE for individual consumer groups, from video streamers to gamers, as a value-added service.
