Introduction
Networking technologies, services and applications are on the market, each with an aim to deliver a Quality of Service (QoS) that is equal to or better than the legacy equipment or improves on its efficiency to deliver that QoS.
Service providers and network operators have trusted brands, the maintenance of which is critical to their business. The challenge is to make new technology work in a way that meets customer expectations for quality, availability and reliability, while still offering network operators the flexibility needed to adapt quickly to new technology.
Quality of Service (QoS) parameters are a key factor in the roll-out of new technology. ETSI works on a wide range of QoS specifications and has been particularly active in workshops and interoperability events on speech and multimedia transmission and service quality. Standardized QoS parameters are increasing in importance as networks become interconnected and a large number of operators and providers interact to deliver communications.
Our Role & Activities
STQ
ETSI TC STQ (Speech and multimedia Transmission Quality) is responsible for standardization relating to terminals and networks for speech and media quality, end-to-end single media and multimedia transmission performance, Quality of Service (QoS) parameters for networks and services and Quality of Experience (QoE) descriptors and methods. TC STQ and its Working Group STQ Mobile work closely with the Third Generation Partnership Project (3GPPTM) and collaborate with other Standards Developing Organizations.
TC STQ and WG STQ Mobile regularly revise their suite of standards. Current and future network and over-the-top (OTT) services and applications in conjunction with the use of smartphones require new QoS measurement methods, reference data and load profiles in order to guarantee the quality of new services.
Recent STQ Mobile published work addresses a range of related areas:
(i) best practices of testing the user experience and network performance of modern web content delivery,
(ii) models for assessment of mobile gaming and OTT telephony services,
(iii) dedicated QoS parameters and test scenarios for 5G networks, and
(iv) best practices for network benchmarking and scoring.
The Committee regularly organizes ETSI STQ Workshops, successfully bringing together key stakeholders, promoting ETSI work and attracting participation in TC STQ.
STQ recently published and revised a new specification on methods for the objective prediction of listening effort. This important work will help progress in developing the guidance and methodology regarding intelligibility for impaired hearing users. The developed methods can be used for various applications, such as evaluation of terminals and networks, up to hearing aid optimization. This can have a substantial market impact for the expert users but, moreover, for the population with impaired hearing capabilities. STQ has also recently published a new specification for a perceptually-based predictor of echo impairments that may be introduced by speech communications terminals. The predictor fills a gap in existing standards for evaluating an important aspect of the user experience. STQ also published and revised a new and important specification providing characterization methodology and requirements for the ETSI LC3plus speech codec. In addition, the latest revision includes detailed characterization methods and results from characterization testing.
3GPP
3GPPTM Technical Specification Group SA2 covers Quality of Service requirements for access to both packet and circuit switched GSM and 3G networks.
3GPPTM Technical Specification Group SA4 deals with the specifications for speech, audio, video, and multimedia codecs, in both circuit-switched and packet-switched environments. Other topics within the mandate of SA WG4 are: quality evaluation, end-to-end performance, and interoperability aspects with existing mobile and fixed networks (from codec point of view).
Standards
A full list of related standards in the public domain is accessible via the ETSI standards search.