It's Not All About Speed

Everywhere you look right now, the focus is on Broadband Speed. Is it “Full Fiber”, “Part fiber”. Who has the fastest!? According to Ofcom research in the UK, 27% of consumers don’t understand the terminology used, with 46% claiming to be using full fiber, even though it wasn’t even available in their region.

Who cares about broadband speed?

Outside the industry, hardly anyone knows what a Mbps or a Gbps is and even fewer know (or care) how many Mbps you need to watch Netflix in HD or YouTube. Some more savvy users such as gamers will care, but in this case about latency, not speed. This is not to say speed is unimportant, just that customers consider other aspects.

Why aren’t we all driving sports cars?

If the most important thing in life was speed, we would all be driving Formula 1 racing cars or similar. The fact that we aren’t, indicates an important fact:

“Most people focus on Quality not Speed”

People don’t care about speed, they care about:

Netflix quality
Call of Duty quality
iPlayer / Disney+ quality
Teams / Zoom video quality

Now you can argue that speed helps provide good quality services of course, but it doesn’t guarantee it. Quality can depend on many factors, such as: the application in use, packetloss, latency and jitter. Some of these factors may also be impacted by in home wi-fi.

People don’t care about speed, they want to:

Protect children from adult content
Protect devices from cyber threats
Be able to have a reliable web conference, even when the kids are online
Have an internet connection that doesn’t drop

Changing Mindsets to focus on Quality

One reason the industry’s marketing focuses on speed today is that it is technically easy and convenient to measure. Many speed test tools are available online. However, if a user is getting a poor experience with Netflix, they won’t care that they have a great speed test result.

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Measuring and managing the quality of experience (QoE) is harder, but not impossible. This will enable more meaningful messages:

Run Conference calls without video breakup
Watch live sport without stalls
Don’t let gaming interrupt your TV

Monitoring the quality of experience of every subscriber also provides invaluable churn related data. If someone is consistently getting a poor QoE score for YouTube, Netflix and so on, then they are highly likely to be unhappy. This is perhaps the most important aspect of focusing on quality - your customers will love you.

How Sandvine measures and manages quality

Step one is to identify the application / service in use. Sandvine can identify >95% of network traffic, even with encryption.

Step two is to measure network KPIs very accurately, such as Packetloss, latency, throughput and jitter.

Step three is to match the KPIs to the service’s requirements to create a score. As a simplified example, YouTube requires good throughput, web conferencing also requires low packetloss.

Now transform the scoring into per user metrics:

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Managing Subscriber QoE with Sandvine

Sandvine includes the ability to intelligently queue and shape traffic, which means different applications can be prioritized over others for each home. For example, prioritize business applications for home workers, gaming traffic for gamers, video streaming for binge watchers and so on.

Summary

Subscribers care about the quality of the service they receive. The headline top speed is of marginal interest to most people. ISPs would do well to shift mindset to focus on the quality of the user experience AND providing the types of value-added services people want. Having a great speed test result is no substitute for making sure customers receive great service.

You can learn more about how Sandvine puts App QoE front and center on your network and you can book a meeting with us to talk more about what Sandvine brings to the table at MWC24 in Barcelona in February.