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The new battleground for telcos
It’s high time for the operators to focus on the customer
experience metrics that matter rather than those that are just
easy to measure
By Soma Tah
T
he telecom market in India is brutally competitive.
We have seen high spectrum acquisition costs,
and tariff rates causing bitter rivalry among the
operators in the past. Well, the rivalry has never gone
away, and rather became an intense one as the market
continued to evolve further with the introduction of new
telecom services, making customer experience the new
battleground for the operators in the telecom sector.
The most important factor in driving brand perception
and delivering a good customer experience for a telecom
operator is its network experience, which is commonly
referred as network speed.
Today, it is very important for the network operators
to decide what use cases (e.g. video, gaming, TV, IoT, and
so on) do they want their network to perform the best and
assess if they are providing the right experience for that
use case. Given that today more than 60% of a mobile
operator’s traffic is video, this decision becomes more
important than ever.
Figure 1: Variation of Play Start Time (s) with Network Speed (Mbps)
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A detailed analysis on the state of video experience
in India done by MOZARK shows that network speed
beyond a point does not make any difference to the
actual experience. The analysis is done on the basis of
the performance of 6 OTTs -Youtube, Netflix, Hotstar,
SonyLIV, Voot, Zee5on three mobile operators Jio, Airtel,
and Vodafone Idea.
Here is summary of the report State of Video Streaming
Experience in India.
Focusing on network speed alone to improve video
streaming experience is not sufficient anymore: How
quickly a video loads once the user clicks on a thumbnail
and whether it plays seamlessly without buffering are the
most important aspects of video streaming experience.
Research shows that Play Start Time (PST) below 4
seconds is what users prefer and MOZARK’s analysis
shows that about 14 Mbps is what networks need to
deliver this level of PST. (See Figure 1)
The rate of deterioration in PST KPI
as network speeds fall below 5 Mbps
was quite steep. However, once the
network speeds go beyond 5 Mbps the
incremental improvement in PST was
quite flat. Between 5 and 30 Mbps,
the PST times increase only by around
~2s which while does have a material
impact on user experience is not as
steep as increases of 4s seen when
network speeds dropped below 5Mbps.
Maintaining a video rebuffering
rate of below 4% is critical for the
operators: Research on the customer
perception of rebuffering shows
that when rebuffering rate increases
beyond 4%, it starts to have a material
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impact on the user’s perception. When

network speeds go beyond 14 Mbps the
rebuffering rate too drops below 4%.
Thus, delivering a video rebuffering rate
of below 4% is critical. (See Figure 2)

Operators must focus on the

Minimum Operating Threshold
(MOT) for delivering the right user
experience: MOT is a function of video
optimization performed at the Core
and transport architecture. The study
has found variations across operators
in terms of the MOT i.e. the minimum
speed necessary to deliver PST/Re-
buffering rate necessary for quality
Figure 2: Variation of Re-buffering ratio (%) with Network Speed (Mbps) video experience for end user. Jio, for
example was able to deliver a better PST
and Video Rebuffering rate at the same
network speeds as compared to the other
operators, especially when the speeds
were low. Airtel was only marginally
better than Vodafone Idea. This goes to
show that investments must be made
beyond the radio network, on building
a strong backhaul, content delivery core
and better peering partnerships with
OTTs. (See Figure 3 & 4)

Collaboration between operators

and apps is critical for the end
user experience: The study found
significant variances between apps in
Figure 3: Variation of Play Start Time (s) with Network Speed (Mbps) (Across Operators) terms of the PST delivered for a given
network speed. Youtube and Hotstar for
example, perform extremely well even
under poor network conditions. Netflix
deteriorates in PST performance under
poor network conditions but as soon as
speeds get to 10Mbps it dramatically
improved in performance to match
that of Youtube. Similar trends were
observed for rebuffering rates too. (See
Figure 5 & 6)

The data thus clearly shows the

need for investments in a robust
content delivery network, streamlined
application architecture, and putting in
place thorough testing and debugging
mechanism within their organization
Figure 4: Variation of Re-buffering ratio (%) with Network Speed (Mbps) (Across Operators) around application experience.

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A long way to go before India can

deliver the MOT network speeds for
ideal video experience: Despite the
improvements, we still lack the ideal
network performance necessary to
deliver seamless video experience across
the country. The number of samples that
were above 14Mbps hardly touched 20%
across the country. Operators need to
continue investing in expanding their
site footprint, spectrum, fiber to deliver
a consistent 14Mbps network speed so
that Indian users can enjoy an ideal video
streaming experience. (See Figure 7)

The analysis of more than 6-months

Figure 5: Variation of Play Start Time (s) with Network Speed (Mbps) (Across Video Apps) network performance data of the
country’s top three operators shows
that the network performance clearly
saw a dip during the lockdown period
due to increased traffic and operational
hindrances on the field. However, the
performance showed an improvement
trend and is very close to being back to
pre-COVID-19 levels.

Preparing for the future

The MOT may vary for each use
case. Network planners need to think
about what use cases they want their
networks to support and start designing
their networks to deliver the MOT
required for that use case. This in fact
Figure 6: Variation of Re-buffering ratio (%) with Network Speed (Mbps) (Across Video Apps) will become a key design factor with 5G
as every use case will have a designated
SLA.

The study done by MOZARK also

highlights the fact that The time
has come for network operators and
regulators to focus on the metrics that
matter rather than those that are just
easy to measure. Thequality of service
measurements also need to become
more sophisticated to not just be
focused on quantity of data points of
metrics that are easy to measure (e.g.
network speed) but focus on measuring
the end user experience.

Figure 7: Monthly trend of Speed tests above MOT* somat@cybermedia.co.in

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