Quality-of-Experience (QoE) as the New Competitive Battleground -- Part 1 of a 3-part series
For decades, competition in the broadband market has followed a simple and intuitive logic: faster is better. From megabits to gigabits, from DSL to fiber, network evolution has been measured primarily in raw throughput. Marketing messages, regulatory benchmarks, and consumer expectations have all reinforced the idea that speed equals quality.
But as we enter 2026, that model is no longer sufficient.
Across mature broadband markets, throughput parity is becoming the norm. Gigabit access is widely available, multi-gigabit tiers are common, and Wi-Fi standards have advanced well beyond the requirements of most consumer applications. And yet, customer dissatisfaction, churn, and operational costs remain high for many Internet Service Providers.
In this three-part series, we’ll explore how Quality of Experience is becoming the most important differentiator in a competitive marketplace.
Why throughput is dead as a differentiator, and how ISPs will compete on experience
Quality-of-Experience (QoE) is rapidly emerging as the new competitive battleground for ISPs. Throughput is still important, but it’s no longer a primary differentiator.
In most developed markets, access speeds exceed typical household demand and peak usage rarely aligns with a provider’s advertised maximum speeds. In addition, competing providers often advertise nearly identical speed tiers and speed test results fail to reflect real-world application performance. As a result, speed has become an abstract promise rather than a tangible benefit for the end user.
From a customer perspective, the difference between a 1 Gbps and 2 Gbps plan is almost meaningless if their video calls freeze intermittently, online games suffer from latency spikes, streaming services buffer unpredictably, and/or Wi-Fi performance varies dramatically from room to room. This mismatch creates frustration and erodes trust in the provider.
Defining Quality-of-Experience
Quality-of-Experience is the user’s perceived performance of connectivity-based services over time.
Unlike Quality-of-Service (QoS) – which focuses on network-level parameters – QoE is application- and context-aware and reflects real user conditions. It can also vary by household and the devices on the network, and is influenced by access network and Wi-Fi performance, as well as the customer’s usage patterns.
QoE encompasses multiple factors including:
- Latency, jitter, and packet loss
- Wi-Fi coverage and reliability
- Application responsiveness
- Performance consistency during peak hours
- Predictability across time and sessions
In short, QoE measures what actually matters most to users, not what looks good on a specification sheet.
From networks to living systems
Many ISPs attempt – and fail – to address the customer experience using existing monitoring frameworks. They try to measure the network, not the user; lack performance context across domains; trigger alarms without explaining root cause; depend on manual workflows; and their operations are reactive, threshold-based, siloed by domain, and focused on detecting faults after a failure has already occurred.
QoE-driven operations, on the other hand, require a shift toward living systems that sense the customer experience, learn from the history of this experience, and adapt to make it better.
In the next segment of this series, we’ll explore how living systems reshape network design and how addressing this shift can make service providers significantly more competitive.
