By Stephen Bye, President of Ziff Davis' Connectivity Division
Connectivity has become the invisible fabric of everyday life. At work or play, in the office or factory, at home or on the go, connectivity has become as transformational to daily activity as the birth of the automobile or the development of the electrical grid. While exciting, the changes that connectivity has catalyzed to date are only scratching the surface. At Ookla, we believe that reaching connectivity’s full potential requires a sea change in how the industry thinks about, tests and reports on network performance.
It’s not enough to look at networks only from an internal or service-assurance view. Where the rubber meets the road, and where testing and reporting need to direct more attention, is showing how networks impact real-world experience. Adding a cell site, optimizing a network, or establishing new regulatory thresholds for speed only matter if they meaningfully impact the end-user’s connected experience. With network connections set to become richer, deeper and faster moving forward, embracing this outside-in view of networks is critical not just for today but also to help build the future of connectivity.
To meet these shifting needs, Ookla has been at the forefront of developing a holistic approach that offers complementary insights that tie together Quality of Service (QoS), Coverage and Quality of Experience (QoE) views. It all starts with data collection. Over 45 billion consumer-initiated tests have been performed to date with Speedtest, Ookla’s flagship product. However, we firmly believe it is time to do away with the false dichotomy of crowd vs. drive testing: both are needed, and each has strengths that complement the other’s potential blind spots. With vast amounts of data collected anywhere that networks are live, crowdsourced data provides real-world performance views of the places that mean the most to consumers. This breadth of collection means crowdsourced data also provides insights across locations that drive testing can’t or won’t access — such as private buildings, residential homes, rural areas and more. Meanwhile, drive testing can provide same-time, same-place testing to isolate variables along with lower-layer information that enables root cause analysis and pinpoint optimization work. With Ookla Wind, we’re even using controlled drive and walk testing to help with live event monitoring, single site verification and optimization before major events like the NFL’s recent championship game.
But the future of connectivity needs more than just this combination of crowd- and drive-testing. It also requires new ways of reporting that create a stronger bridge between end-users and the networks themselves. That’s why Ookla now complements RF measurements with user experience insights showing how connectivity impacts video streaming, video conferencing, gaming, web browsing and (coming soon) instant messaging. After all, a network can look picture-perfect from internal views, but real-world user experience may tell a different story. Our new user experience insights are helping operators uncover hidden network issues like capacity problems and correlate areas of poor video or web browsing experience to RF conditions.
We’re also expanding the capabilities of our popular Downdetector platform, which uses consumer-reported information to provide early alerts of service disruptions. Along with insights that foster cross-organizational efficiencies between customer care and network operation centers, Downdetector will provide new communication pathways for providers to speak directly with their customers.
This push toward holistic testing and reporting is also the driver bringing Ookla and its sister-company, Ekahau, together. As just one example of the complementary connectivity views resulting from this combination, consider how Ekahau’s real-time testing of Wi-Fi networks, Speedtest results and Wind’s controlled testing of mobile networks could be brought together. In addition to enhanced views of in-building performance, it could also supply insights that help converged networks provide seamless connectivity to consumers and businesses.
In short, yesterday’s testing methods are no longer sufficient. That’s why Ookla has created a complementary connectivity portfolio designed to help providers create greater efficiencies, cost savings and performance wins in the networks of today while they work toward developing the connectivity solutions of tomorrow. This means bringing together crowd and controlled testing, mobile and fixed data, RF measurement and user experience insights. It means offering huge volumes of data along with an unmatched depth and breadth of KPIs across QoS, Coverage, QoE and even consumer sentiment views. It means supporting all of the above with a globally-recognized brand that consumers, governments and the industry trust. And it’s all done for one simple reason: to measure, understand and help improve connected experiences in service of creating better connectivity for all.
