The Broadband Forum has introduced a project aimed at providing broadband service providers with AI-based tools to assess customer experience.

The project, “Service Types, QoE Parameters and Evaluation’ (WT-524),” builds on existing Broadband Forum initiatives and work by the IETF and ITU-T. The goal is to create a “one-stop shop” of quality of experience (QoE) indicators and algorithms that the press release says are currently dispersed across many different industry specifications.

“The most reliable measurement of the perceived broadband experience is the user’s subjective evaluation, and these approaches are not feasible for the BSP to overcome real time issues. This new project from the Broadband Forum will ultimately provide BSPs with a way to accurately estimate the service quality their customers experience in a more efficient way,” Broadband Forum President and Director of the Service Requirements Work Area Manuel Paul said in a press release about the new customer experience offering.

The project is structured to go beyond existing measures for bandwidth, latency, jitter, and packet loss performance. It will estimate a QoE for quality layers that ultimately comprise users’ overall experience with a service or an application. They include content quality, transaction quality, and flow and network quality.

Broadband Forum and other organizations’ input will help develop a quality of outcome (QoO) that estimates how an application is expected to behave and provide an objective score that is understandable to the end user, according to the press release.

The key appears to be that measures of customer experience quality must evolve along with the ways in which broadband is delivered to end users. This requires industry cooperation.

“The user’s service requirements must be known to improve service delivery, making it even more important for industry collaboration to share real-world broadband challenges and align on evolving industry priorities,” Broadband Forum CEO Craig Thomas said in the press release. “Broadband Forum’s latest project is paving the way to make this services-led broadband approach a reality for BSPs.”