Science

There is a complex relationship between infrastructure behaviour and human experience. Normally, people are blissfully unaware that the application they are using is being carried over global infrastructure. It just seems to work. To people, the constant dynamic ‘behaviour’ of thousands of pieces of network and server equipment simply goes unnoticed. At some point, however, infrastructure behaviour, or combinations of behaviour, begins to affect application performance in a way that people see; a video might pixelate slightly, audio might become glitchy or web browsing might become inconsistent. From here, as infrastructure behaviour increases, people’s experience tends to drop off a cliff. Where the cliff is, how steep the cliff is and the shape of the cliff varies significantly, application by application.

Ten years of research at QM, University of London, mean that we can quantify the human experience of any application in any location. We provide a new Perceptual Quality (PQ) lens with which to examine your infrastructure. Our PQ Scores are a reliable proxy for human experience. If you asked a group of users in a room, using the same application over the same infrastructure to grade their experience, our PQ Score would be a reliable proxy for the average grade of the room. We know when people don’t notice infrastructure behaviour, and we know when they do, where the experience cliffs are and how steep they are! In short, we can quantify the human experience – and hence economic impact – of your infrastructure on your users and customers, wherever they are, whatever applications they are using. By understanding the complex relationship between infrastructure behaviour and human experience, we can also accurately diagnose which piece of infrastructure, and its behaviour, that is the genuine source of impairment to human experience and economic impact of any application.