Who in the telco industry hasn't cringed upon hearing this famous tagline? The advertisement may have been about poor network coverage, but it also spoke to the bad experience of dropped calls and poor call quality-in other words, the quality of service.
The pursuit of call quality has been the wireless industry's holy grail since the first call was made by Alexander Graham Bell in 1876. When the ITU formalized a definition of Quality of Service (QoS) in 1994, the industry finally had a common, objective mechanism that could be embedded into the technology itself to help ensure the best possible calling experience. And all was good-for a while. That is until the arrival of the Internet and the explosion of cell phone usage.
As the technologies behind wired and wireless communications evolved, the very definition of a phone call did too. Calling was no longer limited to handsets and it can now be made and received from anywhere in the world via the Internet (IP-based) and Over-The-Top (OTT) apps such as Skype and WhatsApp. Operators were faced with integrating this new paradigm into their existing business models and managing the resulting network hybrids. All the while, callers continued to expect the same level of call quality that they'd always experienced.
"Can you hear me now?"
The time has come for us as an industry to work together definitively to answer this question and find a more balanced approach to how we manage and monitor the quality of the calling experience. We need to integrate the objectivity of QoS with the subjectivity of handsets, access points, and apps into a cohesive Quality of Experience (QoE) toolset/methodology. Whether making a circuit-switched call, an IP-based call, or using an OTT app, people need to continue to be confident that when they answer...
"I can hear you."
...they'll be heard.
