Quality of experience: why does it matter to capacity service providers, and what affects it?
In recent years with increasing competition, quality of
experience (QoE) has become more and more important to service providers.
Subscriber loyalty hinges on that crystal-clear HD call or glitch-free video
streaming, and poor QoE can lead to loss of reputation, decreased customer
loyalty and ultimately missed revenues.
Connectivity providers, from SD-WAN providers delivering
connectivity services to enterprise customers over the public internet, to
ISPs, will be familiar with the need for QoE, which in turn depends on Quality
of Service (QoS). It is a common misconception that low bandwidth is
responsible for poor QoS, leading to service providers advertising high
bandwidth rates and customers using it as the foundation for buying decisions.
In fact, the biggest cause of poor QoS is high latency.
It leads to slower loading webpages that are ineffective,
as users tend to give up quickly on sites that don’t load properly or are delayed.
Latency and packet loss also have a negative effect on the behaviour of
different applications, leading to higher abandonment rates. As a result,
businesses and consumers switch from service providers whose networks have high
latency.
Poor
QoE has a direct impact on revenue, loyalty and reputation
QoE information is widely available to consumers, to enable
them to choose service providers based on their needs. Many of the world’s
largest content providers such as Netflix, YouTube and Google provide public
rankings of ISPs in each country, ranking by how quickly the ISP can
successfully reach and deliver the desired content to customers. Customers
often refer to these rankings when choosing ISPs, and being at the top of the
ranking has a clear competitor advantage. It is to be noted that these rankings
are developed on the basis of latency, rather than bandwidth.
Specialised ranking websites are widely available,
providing information on latency in uplink and downlink speeds. Speed test
websites assess connection quality to see how fast a certain provider can reach
another specific destination or internet exchange point in another part of the
world. Those with high latency and low download speeds are penalised with poor
rankings, resulting in churn, loss of reputation and loyalty.
Optimal
routing will address poor QoE
What creates high latency and ultimately poor QoE? Rather
than low bandwidth, the culprit for high latency is suboptimal routing.
Suboptimal routing profoundly impacts upstream and downstream loading times for
customers, and is the primary reason for high latency. Packet loss, too, can be
caused by poor routing, and is the most common reason why data does not reach
its final destination successfully.
QoE problems caused by poor routing is a major problem for
many providers. It has been estimated that out of every 25TB of traffic
transferred via the internet, 9TB is not routed optimally. On top of that, 84%
of packet loss is also caused by sub-optimal routing. As a result of this,
best-effort internet is no longer appropriate for many enterprise, streaming
and telepresence applications.
Border Gateway Protocol (BGP) is the most common protocol
used by routers to choose the path to a packet’s destination: it is based on
identifying adjacent networks and using the least number of networks to get
data from one point to another. BGP routing often does not select the quickest
or most successful routing option, as no provision is made to test the latency
of the route or the links in a route, often leaving service providers to
grapple with high latency and throughput to desired destinations.
Routing can be improved by establishing public peering
connections with problematic destinations that require numerous hops over major
networks, resulting in direct transfer of data packets with minimal delay. By
minimising the number of hops between two parties, a direct path is
established. However, establishing direct interconnections over major IXPs on a
global scale is a complex process. Establishment of a global IXP connectivity
can become expensive. An alternative to this is utilising a remote peering
provider that will take care of the administration with global IXP’s, make sure
you don’t need a router in the IXP datacenter and ensure you have a low latency
connection to them.
To minimise loss of reputation and decreased customer loyalty, service providers need to put QoE and routing optimisation at the forefront of their business model. The use of ranking services and speed tests are putting ISPs in the spotlight, and those that don’t improve their QoE will ultimately lose out. In order to address QoE, providers need to look at and monitor their routing infrastructure to ensure the quickest and most optimal route is taken for data to reach its end destination successfully.
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