New tech to fix laggy videos and games on high-speed broadband
Key Points
- Vodafone is rolling out Quality of Outcome (QoO) technology to millions of customers' homes in Europe.
- The technology aims to solve glitchy or laggy connections related to packet loss or instability rather than bandwidth limitations.
- Vodafone is working with CUJO AI to create and monitor a new Quality of Outcome metric across its customer base, which it will use to inform its network improvements.
- Quality of Outcome software is now rolling out to Vodafone home broadband hubs with Wi-Fi 7 routers across Europe.
Vodafone is the first broadband provider in Europe to launch software aimed at fixing lag when streaming video or playing games on high-speed broadband connections.
The company is working with CUJO AI to deploy Quality of Outcome technology across its customer base in Europe, which will help it to identify where it can upgrade its network to improve connection quality.
While bandwidth is often a limiting factor in video streaming and gaming, it is possible for these experiences to glitch, buffer, or lag even when a customer is using a high-speed broadband connection.
This is caused by instability related to the data packets carrying the application rather than a bandwidth limitation of the connection. Data packets can suffer from increased latency or packet loss, failing to reach their destination and having to be re-sent.
Thanks to this phenomenon, even users on a 1Gbps fibre connection could see their Netflix stream glitch out or lag under certain conditions.
To help address this issue, Vodafone is rolling out new software to its millions of broadband Home Hubs with Wi-Fi 7 routers. The software collects measurements related to bandwidth, latency, and packet loss and uses this data to produce a score for each application, assessing its performance on the company’s network.
Vodafone noted that the contents of data packets are not inspected by this software, nor are customer details made available to it.
This score relates to Quality of Outcome (QoO), which aims to provide a more accurate assessment of the end-users experience of a broadband offering rather than just the bandwidth of their connection.
Vodafone said this metric is ideal for evaluating how well network conditions support applications such as responsive gaming, uninterrupted video calls, and reliable cloud services.
“Delivering an excellent broadband experience requires us to look beyond headline speeds and understand how the network performs for the applications our customers use every day,” said Vodafone Director of Home Technology and Products Oscar Gallego.
“Working with CUJO AI, we are bringing Quality of Outcome to millions of Vodafone home broadband hubs connected to our pan-European network.”
“Network quality should ultimately be measured by what customers can successfully do with their connection,” said CUJO AI CEO Remko Vos.
“Vodafone’s deployment across multiple markets represents an important step toward making outcome-based network measurement an operational reality at scale.”
