A conversation about QoE with Tim Brooks, Account Director, Ascom Network Testing
Download a transcript of the interview and be the first to receive the Getting the best QoE report
The move to all-IP networks and the focus on QoE increases the complexity of testing and monitoring mobile networks. There are more ways – and more subtle ones – in which performance may suffer and the impact on subscribers’ QoE may vary. Operators want to capture how subscribers perceive the service, but it is challenging to do so. In this conversation with Tim Brooks, Account Director at Ascom Network Testing, we discussed how operators can get better visibility into their network performance and into how that affects QoE. Active testing is one way to do that. “We’re emulating or doing what the customer would normally do, and we’re reporting how it turns out,” said Tim.
Ultimately operators will have to rely on multiple sources of information and, when a problem arises, drill down to capture the QoE of single subscriber. Tim told us: “Different types of monitoring and testing can detect different types of issues, so the real challenge for operators is to detect if something has gone wrong. Then if something is wrong, to quantify it, to repeat the problem, then to get enough information so they can investigate it.” This requires a shift from network-averaged KPIs to a scattergram of KPIs and other metrics that capture variability of the user experience and tell the operator where performance is good and bad, and what the sources of this variability are.
Read the full interview to learn about Ascom’s approach to ensure that testing and monitoring in mobile networks captures the complexity of QoE, and guides operators to optimize their network resources in real time.
This interview is part of our upcoming report “Getting the best QoE: Trends in traffic management and mobile core optimization”. We have also discussed this on an accompanying webinar you can view on demand here.
