Improving user experience with UDP

Improving user experience with UDP

2020.09.18 – Robin Mersh, CEO at Broadband Forum

There is no denying that in the space of five years, a lot can change in the world. Cloud technology has become mainstream, a digital voice assistant is now a staple device in many people’s households and there has been a boom in IoT appliances being used in homes and businesses. While some future events can be expected, others are impossible to predict.

How consumers today use internet access is an excellent example of something that would have been relatively difficult to predict five years ago. Some future developments were accurately captured; for example, increasing demand on internet connectivity would mean a need for more fiber deployments. However, what could not be predicted was the rapid rate these deployments would need to take place. Equally, it was thought speed/capacity alone was the key performance measure for internet access. Yet, with the reliance on real-time connectivity, for video chat, broadcasting, and gaming, increasing throughout the globe, latency has become equally critical to access the internet.

New transition for speed tests

The increase in fiber rollouts has meant that content is moving closer to the user, but the user streams and content to and from servers frequently do not require the user’s full access rate. In such cases, latency and not speed becomes a critical issue for real-time applications. Whilst high bandwidth is a good thing, high latency can mean devices such as Virtual Reality (VR) headsets, and internet-dependent activities, like video chat, cannot work at optimum levels, which can be frustrating for consumers.

For operators, it is becoming increasingly difficult to work out which customers are not receiving a high-quality service. Changes in technology have caused the dominant methods of helping users test their actual “internet speed” to show their age. The speed of access links are increasing into the gigabit range for some technologies, and testing is becoming less accurate for the higher the speed, especially when over 500mbps, with it becoming completely redundant at around 750mbps.

Transmission Control Protocol (TCP), which current speed tests are based on, was for a long time considered the most reliable transport protocol, but it can react conservatively to loss and round-trip delay, to produce a significant underestimate of Maximum IP-Layer Capacity. This has resulted in a gap between actual service rates and TCP’s estimates. For operators facing increasing regulatory demands to provide consumers with minimum guaranteed speeds and ensure these are delivered as advertised, finding a solution has become a priority.

The industry is, therefore, seeing a transition to new protocols like QUIC [3,4,5,6], that will replace TCP for many applications. These new protocols use User Datagram Protocol (UDP) as the transport protocol and encrypt activity above the transport layer. Measuring the IP-Layer Capacity on a user’s access link should use the same transport protocols as applications. Shifts in the network environment, along with the needs of Internet Service Providers (ISPs), have significant repercussions on the network. Therefore, the right technology must be in place to accurately assess performance.

A game-changer for broadband

Broadband Forum recognized the need to develop a new broadband speed test to deliver more accurate results for a vastly improved broadband user experience. The Forum has created a new User Datagram Protocol (UDP) Speed Test that will quantify and verify ‘ultra-fast’ broadband. The metrics and methods being developed apply to mobile as well as fixed access, with test measurements on an LTE network showing significantly more consistent results than their TCP-based counterparts. This is done using updated methods and metrics outlined in Broadband Forum’s IP Layer Capacity Metrics and Measurement (TR-471) specification, which are more suited to the gigabit services now being deployed. The UDP-based measurement of Maximum IP Capacity simultaneously measures the packet loss, round-trip delay, delay variation, and reordering present. This is superior information to that provided by TCP and Ping measurements made separately, and it will ultimately close the gap between actual service rates and TCP’s estimates under the measured conditions.

This project aims to solve current measurement issues with high-speed internet access and will act as the ultimate communication protocol used across the internet for time-sensitive transmissions, such as video playback. The new metrics and methods of measurement will be able to keep up with changing trends by testing networks in instances where lower latency is just as critical as speed. This includes applications with growing user uptake such as Augmented Reality (AR), VR, UHD streaming and gaming.

The need for speed

With today’s consumers expecting their broadband service to deliver high speed and low latency seamlessly, the user experience must be at the core of any service provider’s offering.

A benefit to both providers and consumers, is Broadband Forum’s UDP Speed Test which provides a criterion to ensure next-generation networks meet industry-wide expectations and can deliver the connected services we consume every day.