A fundamental shift is underway in the broadband industry. Now that high-speed broadband offerings are ubiquitous, the key to winning subscribers no longer hinges on speed. The focus has shifted toward delivering an exceptional quality of experience (QoE). Consumer churn, often triggered by poor broadband service experiences, related to micro outages, unavailability and latency issues, underscores the importance of prioritizing service reliability and consistency.
This article will highlight the common quality of service (QoS) challenges facing today’s broadband service providers along with strategies for preventing churn and maintaining profitability.
Why broadband QoS is more important than speed
Broadband service providers face an intricate array of challenges, particularly concerning customer QoE. The increasing popularity of streaming video content on today’s broadband networks is creating congestion, increasing latency during peak usage times and affecting time-sensitive applications for entertainment, work and business. Service reliability significantly influences QoE and subscribers are willing to change providers if the quality of experience is perceived as being higher elsewhere. Managing QoS needs to be prioritized to ensure subscriber satisfaction with the service remains high.
Network congestion and the risks to QoS
Network traffic continues to grow and operators must prepare for normal levels of growth in their ongoing capacity planning. Congestion can occur when operators haven’t sufficiently planned for traffic growth, if investments in capacity increases are delayed, or if subscriber usage trends change unexpectedly. These scenarios, among others, all lead to service-impacting outcomes that may be hard to mitigate if operators are unprepared.
Today’s concerns about how operators prepare for and manage congestion will have a critical impact on their ability to maximize customer QoE, stem churn and drive increases in NPS.
Addressing QoS issues through virtualization
Adopting a virtualized broadband network core, operators can quickly and easily scale capacity, while also gaining additional tools to deliver an exceptional QoE to subscribers. Let’s take a closer look at how virtualization enables operators to ensure high QoS and the best possible QoE.
Streaming telemetry for greater proactivity
Operators are moving away from legacy controller hardware and embracing virtualized broadband network cores enabling streaming telemetry. Legacy network monitoring solutions and approaches are notoriously slow, taking measurements of network performance or traffic loading every five to 30 minutes. Within that timeframe, service-impacting network issues may go undetected.
Virtualized solutions introduce streaming telemetry, which enables near-real time performance and health checks feeding into user-friendly dashboards, with insights into how to proactively take action. Streaming telemetry combined with a more robust, scalable solution empowers service providers to effectively deliver more reliable internet service.
Faster upgrades and reduced maintenance
To further enhance QoS, a virtualized broadband core enables in-service software upgrades (ISSU) for zero disruption to services, reduced maintenance windows and simplified operations. A virtualized core inherently facilitates automated configuration, network intelligence and more efficient ecosystem monitoring, which in turn ensures the highest levels of service availability to increase subscriber retention.
Converged networks: control multiple access technologies from a single pane of glass
A virtualized core enables operators to deliver high-speed broadband services over both fiber and coax wiring. Converged fiber and DOCSIS networks allow operators to strategically address a variety of broadband service deployment scenarios, with the same architecture and infrastructure, and in many cases, even leveraging existing access infrastructures to optimize ROI even further.
With a unified, virtualized core, operators can strategically deploy fiber leveraging XGS-PON to locations that require more bandwidth, while using the same platform to deliver enhanced, high-speed broadband services over DOCSIS. This common infrastructure approach can lead to significant efficiencies and remove the operational complexity associated with launching new access technologies.
As these new technologies emerge, readiness is vital, and the virtualized core enables support for next-generation standards, such as DOCSIS 4.0 for the cable broadband market, or the evolving PON standards of 25G and 50G. Operators gain flexibility, scalability and future readiness, all controlled and managed from a single pane of glass.
Improving QoS to lower OpEx
A virtualized core expedites the time to market for introducing new features. Software development is no longer hindered by hardware constraints, as the software can be scaled to handle unforeseen workloads, offering flexibility to support a wider range of capabilities.
For instance, with a virtualized broadband core, operators can unleash the full potential of their systems to deploy targeted solutions for low latency using industry standard approaches such as L4S to prioritize latency-sensitive traffic across network infrastructures beyond the access portion and into the backbone network.
As service providers gain more accurate views of network health and performance, they can identify trends and network issues that are causing capacity problems, in order to resolve before QoS issues occur. The result is less support calls, fewer truck rolls, a decrease in ghost events and reduced time spent troubleshooting.
Detailed analytics can help to clearly identify the root cause of issues and allow operators to more accurately determine if an operational issue requires a truck roll or if an issue can be addressed remotely by configuration or was caused by an issue outside the control of the operator, such as a regional power outage.
The ability to optimize the use of field resources, prioritizing their time on network enhancements to address customer QoE issues rather than phantom truck rolls that don’t resolve customer issues has a direct, positive impact on operations.
As operators improve their operational processes, they can redirect their focus toward proactively maintaining networks to address issues before customers experience any impact.
Conclusion
Competition in the broadband space is widespread and increasing rapidly. Research shows that by December 2025, well over 90% of U.S. households will have access to multiple high-speed broadband offerings.
With speed no longer being the main differentiator, service providers cannot afford to sit back and let QoS issues chip away at subscriber satisfaction, which in turn could generate churn and ultimately impact business profitability. The key to delivering a more resilient, reliable high-speed connection is to embrace a multifaceted approach. With the versatility of virtualized software, operators can strategically deploy both fiber and DOCSIS technologies with a common platform, benefit from advanced telemetry and deliver an outstanding QoS to consumers.
