Broadband Forum’s Broadband Quality Experience Delivered (Broadband QED) is an initiative that looks beyond conventional measurements to improve overall broadband experience and improve management of network latency, consistency, predictability and reliability. It’s helping to give users what they want; seamless broadband connectivity, so that their applications can work optimally. The initiative is gathering momentum and is providing operators with the tools they need to meet current user requirements.
The QED framework allows us to confidently make precision statements about application outcomes caused by a network. For example, we can make easily understandable declarations such as: “This network will not cause Google Stadia to fail” or, “This network will cause Google Stadia to have insufficient response time for First-Person Shooters and poor animation fluidity.” “This network is sufficient for Zoom at 720p”. Statements like these are no doubt clearer for the average end-user (or perhaps even an ISP executive) than the alternative, which might sound like something along the lines of: “This network has 832 Mbps, 90ms round-trip latency, 93ms jitter, 0.001% packet loss.”
To counter these time-related issues, the QED Framework looks at distributions of latency, which lets us determine the likelihood of any particular latency value at this moment of time. As an example usecase, we could say that “there is an 0.001% chance that the latency will be over 200ms”. The reason we can make the translation from complex networks to statements about complex application requirements is the QED’s concept of Quantitative Timeliness Agreements (QTA). This can, in turn, let us understand whether a network is, for example, good enough for an HD Zoom call.
There can also be multiple quality levels for the application, for example a VoD 720p, 1080p, or 4K, or Zoom with or without video. Again, we can use multiple (even hundreds or thousands of) QTAs. Although we don’t have perfect QTAs yet, it is achievable. The behavior of the application is deterministic and governed by the rules set by the application developers. QTAs have a viable path for perfection and lets us start simple and expand without starting from scratch.
Make sure you watch our QED webinar recordings ‘Quality of Experience: Real-life Examples, Implementations & Technical Deep Dive’ and ‘Quality of Experience: Why Broadband Speed is not Enough’ to learn more.