Broadband Forum has made significant progress on bringing an improved broadband user experience closer, with two new specifications nearing completion.
These will cover Quality Attenuation and IP Capacity Metrics and Measurements, with the aim of enabling operators to achieve enhanced network performance by moving away from the conventional metric of capacity or ‘speed,’ in favor of real-time monitoring of performance and operation.
Ahead of the new technical specifications, the organisation’s Access and Transport Architecture (ATA) Work Area has released two new white papers from its Performance, Experience and Application Testing (PEAT) Project Stream.
The work builds on the Quality Experience Delivered (QED) initiative which looks beyond conventional measurements to improve the overall broadband experience. The new approaches for network measurement and monitoring drive input into service provider operations systems and will increasingly provide the data used for machine learning, analytics, and AI to provide nearly real time feedback into the network operations. This will support operators in gauging application performance, for example, a video call, and ensure networks adapt to changing application traffic loads to always deliver the best performance to the subscriber.
Gavin Young, head of fixed access centre of excellence at Vodafone, and a Broadband Forum founder said: ‘While capacity or speed is necessary, what customers actually want is for all their applications to just work consistently well; such as video streams without glitches or buffering, video calls, remote working, or uninterrupted gaming. As emphasis is increasingly placed on the quality of broadband, operators can no longer differentiate on capacity alone, and instead must look to also measure and manage the reliability, network responsiveness, consistency and predictability of the services offered.’
