Broadband Forum sets sights on the subscribers' experience
While speed has been top of mind for broadband providers, there’s growing demand to differentiate for consumers by enhancing the quality of experience (QoE) to accommodate the unique devices and applications in the home.
Today’s broadband network providers have mainly cited speed and price as their main differentiators. However, application-appropriate QoE is becoming a priority. Still, service providers need to educate end users so they understand what QoE and latency mean.
The Broadband Forum has been tackling the QoE and QoS issue with its TR-499 standard, which focuses on defining broadband service metrics. It provides a framework for measuring and evaluating the delivery quality broadband services, ensuring consistency and reliability in performance assessments to help BSPs and stakeholders maintain Quality of Service (QoS) delivery.
Broadband providers are seeing the value of differentiating customer QoE on a per-service basis. They are adding application-aware intelligence and monitoring to ensure relevant QoE per application, which the forum notes is an important differentiator when monetizing new services.
There are several customer groups where QoE could be relevant.
Consider the teleworking community. While the number of people working from home (WFH) has decreased slightly since the COVID pandemic leveled off and some organizations have instituted a back-to-office mandate, the segment still accounts for an average of 25% of households applying for a WFH service. Also, there’s a sizeable percentage (around 20%) of gaming households.
Craig Thomas, CEO of the Broadband Forum, told Lightwave during the recent Fiber Connect show in Orlando that service providers need to show subscribers their service is not just a commodity.
“What we're seeing now is how to make fiber and broadband service more appropriate to the applications that people want to use it for, rather than just as a big dumb pipe,” he said. “We can talk fiber all the time, but the subscriber's applications are running on their device and the Wi-Fi connection. So, how do we bridge that from Wi-Fi to the application? And that's the broadband fiber environment, not just the last mile connection.”
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About the Author
Sean Buckley
Sean is responsible for establishing and executing the editorial strategy of Lightwave across its website, email newsletters, events, and other information products.