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Allot: Adding capacity isn’t a cure-all for QoE

by Kelly Hill
written by Kelly Hill Share
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CSPs worry about impacts of IoT, 5G on network congestion

5G promises to offer such enormous bandwidth that it will be able to handle the traffic from massive internet of things deployments, demands from augmented/virtual reality applications and consumers taking advantage of enhanced mobile broadband speeds, all while providing highly reliable and low-latency service with network slices that right-size resources. Easy peasy, right?

Not so fast. A new report from Allot anticipates that despite the billions of dollars that communications service providers are putting into more bandwidth and new network equipment to improve quality of experience across networks and services, congestion isn’t going away.

“On the contrary, Allot firmly believes it will be the same or worse!” the company said in a new report on telecom trends, based on a survey of more than 100 CSPs around the world. “Mobile technology has repeatedly proven the ‘If you build it … they will come’ model to be true. If you build another highway or add lanes, more people will use their cars – increasing demand and generating more traffic. And the same
has been true for telecom – as bandwidth becomes more available, consumption rises.”
Allot found that many CSPs — half of those surveyed — also believe that network congestion will continue to be a problem, even with the advent of 5G. And congestion has a major impact on customers’ quality of experience. Or, as Allot put it, “congestion is the QoE killer.” It slows down the network indiscriminately, impacting some services — such as voice — more directly than, say, file transfer. And according to Allot, “many CSPs choose not to use the traffic shaping capabilities of infrastructure vendors due to performance issues. Meanwhile, others rely on the limited capability of switches and routers to drop traffic in response to crossing congestion thresholds. The problem with this approach is that while it is ‘fair’ in the sense of not discriminating against specific services, applications or users, it harms the QoE of performance-sensitive applications.” 
CSPs put a lot of time and money into improving QoE. The Allot report found that CSPs say their primary reason to measure QoE is to “evaluate customer satisfaction” (69%), or for customer retention (19%); Allot notes that the two reasons are very closely related. Other reasons include regulatory requirements or for resource-planning purposes.
QoE can have a direct impact on a CSP’s ability to retain customers — if they don’t have a consistently good experience, they’re likely to go elsewhere. Interestingly, among the CSPs surveyed by Allot, QoE was seen as most directly impacting churn in terms of mobile internet browsing experience. Nearly 80% of CSPs surveyed said that poor browsing QoE was most likely to lead to churn, compared to 66% saying content uploads QOE impacted churn. Video and voice came in tied for third at 60%.

One of the contributing factors to network congestion is how much of a CSP’s bandwidth gets eaten up by cyberattacks, botnets and the like. Slightly less than half of surveyed CSPs indicated that distributed denial of service attacks currently account for between 3-5% of their traffic; another 11% of them said that DDoS traffic makes up 6-10% of their traffic. And they’re worried that IoT will exacerbate the situation.

“There is high concern that growing IoT deployment will create more traffic,” Allot noted, adding that two-thirds of CSPs said they were “very concerned that IoT will generate outbound DDoS [traffic, and] 51% fear that 5G is going to further increase DDoS traffic.”

Among the report’s other findings:

-Many CSPs — even Tier 1s — “lease a significant portion of their bandwidth from other service providers,” Allot noted. Sixty percent of CSPs surveyed reported that they lease more than 20% of their bandwidth — and 84% of them consider “optimizing leased bandwidth to be important … presumably … to avoid overage penalties, performance degradation, or both, when exceeding thresholds,” the report said.

-Surveyed CSPs reported that they need to expand capacity of around 20% of cells on an annual basis, at a cost of about $30,000 per cell.

-While network planning was rated as the lowest-priority driver for measuring QoE, Allot said that “if you can accurately measure QoE and fix the congestion issues that are degrading it, then you can save a lot of CAPEX by deferring network expansion, while improving QoE” at the same time.

“CSPs are keenly aware of the need to become more customer-centric and are prioritizing quality of experience for end-users,” said Mark Shteiman, VP of product management at Allot. “However, growing network congestion, the launching of new services and the transition to 5G, coupled with the increasing number of unwanted DDoS traffic – itself fueled by IoT and 5G – requires advanced technology solutions that use machine learning and artificial intelligence to detect encrypted traffic, evaluate end-user QoE and manage congestion in real-time. Once CSPs have these tools, they not only improve QoE, but can also save a lot of capex.”

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Kelly Hill reports on network test and measurement, AI infrastructure and regulatory issues, including spectrum, for RCR Wireless News. She began covering the wireless industry in 2005, focusing on carriers and MVNOs, then took a few years’ hiatus and returned to RCR Wireless News to write about heterogeneous networks (remember those?) and network infrastructure. Kelly is an Ohio native with a masters degree in journalism from the University of California, Berkeley, where she focused on science writing and multimedia. She has written for the San Francisco Chronicle, The Oregonian and The Canton Repository. She lives in northern Virginia, not far from Data Center Alley.

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