With the global adoption of cellular technologies and the Internet in the 1990s, the experience of calling fundamentally changed. Phone calls were no longer limited to wired handsets over proprietary circuit-switched networks. They could be made and received from anywhere in the world on an incredibly wide variety of devices. And as people incorporated these technologies more deeply into their lives, their expectations for them evolved.
The first benchmark for people’s expectations of call quality was Quality of Service (QoS). QoS is an industry standard, purely objective measure of the technical aspects of a call—jitter, bitrate, and signal strength. The famous ad campaign from the 2000s, “Can you hear me now?” exemplified this concept. And it was generally effective in helping operators to monitor and meet their customers’ expectations.
With the introduction of IP-based communications services—especially OTT apps—on so many different types of devices, QoS alone became less effective as a measure of quality. Too many of the elements involved in a call—including non-handset devices, third-party communications apps, and personal wireless hotspots—didn’t always incorporate the required QoS monitoring components, yet people still expected high-quality calls. A new way of measuring quality was needed.
Many in our industry are proposing Quality of Experience (QoE) as a better match for subscribers’ increasingly sophisticated expectations of the calling experience. QoE would provide a framework that integrates the objectivity of QoS with the subjective experiences of subscribers’ particular combinations of apps, access points, and applications to create a hybrid measure of call quality. What exactly is QoE? Stay tuned next week as we dig deeper.
