Significant progress in efforts to enhance the quality of the broadband user experience was reached today at the Broadband Forum Q3 meeting in Milan.
In a first-of-its-kind Practical Implementation Demonstration as part of Broadband Forum’s Broadband Quality of Experience Delivered (Broadband QED) initiative, innovative carrier-grade solutions vendor OutSys showed how service providers can look beyond conventional measurements such as minimum/average/maximum latency and jitter to provide operators with deeper insights that can form the foundations for overall broadband experience improvements.
Addressing this same challenge from a different angle, Broadband Forum also announced the publication of Application Layer Test Traffic Architecture and Requirements Technical Report-421 (TR-421), which defines an architecture and requirements for the specification of test traffic and measurements associated with the application layer – an area critical to broadband service quality, but historically overlooked.
“The broadband industry has already achieved remarkable results when it comes to delivering high bit rates to the premises, but operators are now turning their attention to broadband performance and quality,” said Geoff Burke, Chief Marketing Officer at Broadband Forum.
“The demonstration from OutSys and the publication of our Application Layer Testing specification are great examples of what can be accomplished when the industry comes together. To see this tremendous progress realized from projects that were only launched at the beginning of this year is a tremendous accomplishment for Broadband Forum members involved in this work.”
Launched earlier this year, the Broadband QED project uses Quality Attenuation to address the need for the improved performance measurements and analysis required by cutting-edge broadband networks, tackling factors such as latency, consistency, predictability and reliability. Broadband QED provides a framework for decomposing a trip time into distinct components, matching them to the performance degradation sources, for example, packet loss/delay, and relating them to geographical network topology, network features, and network load/scheduling.
The Broadband QED Practical Implementation Demonstration at the Broadband Forum Q3 meeting in Milan consisted of an emulated small-scale broadband service provider network composed of basic building blocks including Subscriber Network, Access Network and Core Network. Within this controlled environment, the network trip time degradation sources can be artificially generated and programmatically adjusted to illustrate how measurement and analysis is carried out in a range of scenarios.
“As new applications place increasing demand on networks, we need to look beyond factors such as data rate and ping time to move from a fast network to a quality network where everything just works,” said Fabrizio Guidotti, Partner at OutSys.
“The demonstration for Broadband Forum members represents a significant step in achieving this as it shows operators how Broadband QED can be implemented to perform measurements and analysis in different scenarios.”
The demo coincides with the publication of Broadband Forum’s Application Layer Testing specification, TR-421. This Technical Report addresses the variations in network traffic that are caused by different types of applications – for example, when video streaming, data tends to be sent in ‘chunks’ whereas video conferencing programs send more frequent packets of data at regular intervals. When these different applications are used by multiple users on the same network, they exacerbate any drop in Quality of Experience (QoE). TR-421 includes a number of use cases which generate test traffic under realistic conditions, conform to defined model parameters and can be reliably repeated, in contrast with traffic generated by previous test specifications which typically did not capture application-layer behavior.
