[Starlink] Researchers Seeking Probe Volunteers in USA

[Doc Searls]

Experience is also based on expectation, and nearly all the ISPs advertise downstream speed, and compete on that. This state of things reminds me of the TV business in the 50s and 60s, when RCA, GE and Zenith competed on picture size (21 inches was tops) more than picture quality. (Sony changed the game with Trinitron in 1968.) So everybody naturally assumes that the quality of their Internet service is almost entirely a matter of downstream speed.

While there is now a widespread understanding that fiber is best, some ISPs talk a fiber game but actually do hybrid fiber coax, delivering essentially coax's asymmetrical speeds. My sister has that with her "fiber" AT&T service in North Carolina, and I have it here in Santa Barbara with Cox.Neither are bad, but neither are FTTH.

Until the ISPs begin to promote and compete on some kind of normative metric for QoE (or other initialism), customers will continue to think by default that downstream speed is the whole game.

An interesting thing with Starlink is that people in rural areas migrating off the likes of HughesNet care more about latency (or the experience of its relative absence) than any other factor. Example: https://www.reddit.com/r/Starlink/comments/t5rx0s/switching_from_hughesnet/

Doc

> On Jan 9, 2023, at 6:50 AM, Livingood, Jason via Starlink <starlink at lists.bufferbloat.net> wrote:
> 
>> AFAIK, quality of service (QoS) refers to network characteristics you
> can measure quantitatively without human opinion being involved, i.e.:
> throughput, latency and packet losses, also availability (MTBF/(MTBF +
> MTTR)). Then, quality of experience (QoE) refers to what the users
> experience, it is subjective, it must be done using subjects that are
> not engineers or telecom technicians, and it is defined by the ITU as
> the MOS (Mean Opinion Score), in Recommendation ITU-T P.800.1.
> 
> ISTM that everyone has a different view of QoS & QoE. My view is that QoS refers to DSCP marking and such (so best effort, priority, less than best effort, etc.) and/or some metric that the *network* is configured to deliver. But...these are all proxies for end user QoE, which used to be difficult to measure individually but is now easy/affordable to do at scale. IMO all that really matters is the end user experience, and that can be quantitatively measured (link capacity at peak hour, responsiveness/working latency, uptime) and qualitatively measured.  After all, the end user does not care about what the network is in theory configured to delivery but only their actual experience using the Internet. __ 
> 
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