What's wrong with your Average Speed-test ONLY tool?

Internet is such an integrated part of our lives today that it won’t be wrong to call it as one of the basic necessities of life. With evolution in telecommunication the speeds and quality of servicing has been increasing every day. Few years back it was hard to believe that we could attain 100Mbps on wireless handheld devices but now tests/field trial for 4.5G, 5G and WLAN shows possibilities of 1Gbps as well.

Quality of Service and User Experience:

With enhancement in network technologies ( 3G-> 4G-> 4.5G-> 5G or 802.11n -> ac->ax), the customers have also become smart, agile and aware. Gone are the days when customers use COVERAGE and ABILITY TO MAKE CALL as the basic criteria to select telecommunication service provider. And hence Service providers are forced to move from KPIs to Customer Experience and Quality of Service.

KPIs and Current Methods:

KPIs: Key parameter indicators are used by operators, executives and engineers to get insight of the network to understand how well the network is performing on the high level. For example: An important KPI is “ACCESSIBILITY” how easy it is to access the network, how many time you tried attempting a call before it is successful but now customers not only observe Accessibility but also take the “Time taken to Access the network” and “Quality of speech during the call”

Data Plans vs Stable Throughput: How much data in how much rupees is replaced by how much stable throughput one would achieve come what may in the data plan.

Hence, the current/ old methods of troubleshooting the network based on KPIs won’t be able to serve customer’s experience.

User Experience and capturing the information to troubleshoot is the key.

KPIs needs to be added with layer of “Advanced KPIs” to understand the real time user experience to enhance Quality of service. It is very important to understand that not only User is facing issue (such as low throughput) but also the user’s Conditions (such as Radio conditions and network condition) at that very time when user faced the issue.

Let’s take an example of real life scenario: Problem statement

Case 1: Just imagine if customer complain: Experienced Low throughput in xyz area?

VS

Case 2: Experienced low throughput in xyz area along with network parameters and Radio parameters (coverage, quality, interference etc.)

Which case/information would help the troubleshooting engineer in better way? OR In which case it would be easier to understand exact user experience and hence improve quality of service?

With so many network elements, subscribers and low ARPU telecommunication model, it becomes very difficult for operators to collect these information (coverage, quality, interference etc.) going to each and every bad use experience location.

User's Perspective with Half information:

Average speed test tools provide half information such as only Speed test results to the users. Hence the user see only Half information, what if the user is at an area where there is very low coverage?

But the user will only see low speed and the customer care engineer would be reported with half information as well. With so much competition it is very important for users to have positive perceptive about the operator. It is ok if customer think " Because I am in poor coverage that's why I get low throughput vs Low throughput only"

Final Words:

Therefore, it is very important for operators and optimization engineers to get as much information real time and from actual users to identify the exact root cause to troubleshoot.

Remember the statement in high school teacher’s use to say: To solve any problem, it is very important to understand the problem statement. Half of the answer lies in the problem statement.

“If I had an hour to solve a problem I'd spend 55 minutes thinking about the problem and 5 minutes thinking about solutions.” - Albert Einstein

P.S : In coming days, I will introduce the tool/s which not only identifies the problem statement but also collects and helps Telecom Operator teams/consumers to understand root cause and take preventive or required measures.