The best networks are the ones you don’t notice
Orange Belgium (OB) claims it has unearthed the elusive secret of happiness after it earned its largest ever haul of customer awards. Independent tests of Belgium’s mobile operators by Opensignal indicate that the best ‘customer experience’ is provided by the fastest network and, by comparison, nothing else matters. The link was exposed after OB earned ‘excellent’ scores in customer-centric categories such as Games Experience, Upload Speed Experience, Core Consistent Quality and Excellent Consistent Quality. The results prove that given the choice of an ‘optimal customer experience’, a ‘customer-facing brand conversation’ and ‘faster services’, the customers would choose speed every time.
The Opensignal tests on Games Experience analyse how mobile users experience multiplayer mobile gaming on an operator’s network. The variables tested are physical conditions including jitter, latency and packet loss. In order to test variation, multiplayer games of different genres were played, where the average sensitivity to network conditions was monitored. Scores were calculated by the end-to-end experience from the users’ devices to the internet endpoints that host real games. Orange Belgium’s score of 73.2 points out of 100 topped the Games Experience test results award.
Orange Belgium scored highly on the Core Consistent Quality, with 92.1% and Excellent Consistent Quality award with 84.8%. The former takes into account parameters such as download speed, upload speed and latency. The Core Consistent Quality is the proportion of user tests (expressed as a percentage) that met the minimum recommended performance thresholds for lower performance applications including Standard Definition video, voice calls and web browsing. The Excellent Consistent Quality is the percentage of users’ tests that met the minimum recommended performance thresholds for watching High Definition video, complete group video conference calls and playing games.
Opensignal’s upload speed experience tests found that OB’s score of 12.7 Mbps was the highest available and earned it the Upload Speed Experience award.
Ultimately, these customer experience endorsements are all linked to speed, which itself is reliant on the amount of hardware that operators invest in and their skill at managing it. “It’s not only about the pure download speed,” said Stefan Slavnicu, Chief Technology Officer at Orange Belgium, “it’s also about the upload speed, the start-up speed of a high-definition video. This is the mobile experience.”
Admittedly, said Slavnicu, “services are not only about access but how we manage capacity.” However, you ultimately get “state-of-the-art technology [through the raw power of] multigigabit networks.”