Akamai Mobile Performance Analytics Help Mobile Network Operators Measure the Subscriber Experience

Akamai Technologies, Inc. (NASDAQ: AKAM), the global leader in content delivery network (CDN) services, today announced availability of the Company’s Mobile Performance Analytics. The technology takes advantage of real-user monitoring (RUM) to measure real website performance data, such as download time and page load time, collected from actual end-user devices. By measuring Web performance data, combined with video analytics, including video startup time, re-buffering and average bit rate, among others, Mobile Network Operators (MNOs) are better positioned to fully understand how websites load and videos play on their subscribers’ devices. This data can be better tied to Key Performance Metrics (KPIs) for Customer Experience (CX) initiatives.

Until now, MNOs have not had an effective means to truly measure Quality of Experience (QoE). Rather, they were forced to extrapolate the impact of Quality of Service (QoS) network measures such as jitter, packet loss, and latency, or they relied on small sample sizes of drive by testing or synthetic monitoring. Neither approach truly reflects the actual user experience or CX on the operator’s network. Unlike traditional approaches, Akamai Mobile Performance Analytics solution analyzes millions of real data points from hundreds of domains across all networks. As important, MNOs will see analysis of their own data as opposed to data derived from a secondary source. This combination is designed to provide accurate end-user QoE analytics, which are intended to offer a reliable and less expensive means to benchmark performance and help drive improvements across organizations.

For MNOs seeking a better way to quantify the real user experience of their subscribers, Akamai Mobile Performance Analytics solutions are designed to offer the following capabilities and benefits:

• A unique view of actual subscriber performance, collected from billions of data points, across thousands of web sites and hundreds of  video services allows MNOs to measure the actual consumer experience based on QoE – not QoS – data
• A combination of Akamai’s RUM data and media analytics data, customized for use by MNOs, provides a unique view into network performance and can help establish Key Performance Indicators (KPIs) that are more relevant to user experience, and
• The ability to measure and analyze the effect on subscriber experience related to network upgrades or other initiatives intended to improve network performance can help MNOs better understand the ROI of their actions

“Measuring the mobile subscriber experience has typically involved the addition of network equipment or new features that take time to deploy and hasn’t measured the application level data at the handset,” explained Michael Archer, chief strategist, Emerging Mobile Business Unit, Akamai. “By leveraging our detailed video analytics and RUM data and formulating it to the unique needs of MNOs, Akamai Mobile Performance Analytics is offering unprecedented visibility into the customer experience which is intended to help ensure subscriber satisfaction and ultimately brand loyalty.”