Dropped calls anyone?
Sadly, we can all likely attest to having an important discussion interrupted by having the mobile call dropped like a hot potato as we are walking through an airport, play golf in the hills, or even just at the local supermarket. So which mobile operator has the best customer satisfaction in terms of call quality and dropped calls? Companies like Changewave measure such things with their findings as closely monitored by the industry just as the Nielsens are by broadcasters.
Regardless of the aggregated findings, from a user perspective, the issue comes down to our own personal experience, since 100% of the call that I was just talking on was dropped at the most unfortunate part of the conversation when a vital piece of information was cut completely off. With all the data and video now being made available to us on our mobile handsets, we’ll be in the middle of a live sports broadcast and miss that crucial goal or home run, not to mention that key thing our boss told us that we didn’t hear…(doh! sorry again, Suraj…).
Are mobile operators trying to improve on this? Absolutely. And Cisco is right there with them. As providers upgrade their networks to support the constant growth and high volume of traffic, they are also constantly working improve the quality of experience as well. In just a fraction of a second, the signal that keeps our mobile conversations alive needs to be maintained as accurately as an atomic clock. Precision clocking, our engineers say, is one of the critical keys to the quality of our ever mobile Connected Lives. Mobile operators depend on such a mechanism to work flawlessly in accordance with industry standards - acronyms many of us know…ITU, IETF, IEEE. These mobile operators and technology companies, like Cisco, have come together in the IP/MPLS Forum to agree on recommendations that standardize the manner in which our mobile traffic is handled. Just this week, Cisco became the first vendor to have their mobile backhaul solution certified by the MPLS Forum.
As we look to the future, we can expect our mobile operators to continue to improve their service levels in many ways - location independent, personalized content, at speeds we cannot begin to imagine. Hang on to your hats, as our world changes from us chasing our information to our information chasing us!
Posted by Doug Webster at 03:51PM PST
Cisco Around the Web