DENOG17

QoE Matters – How Application-Level Monitoring Pinpoints Network Issues
2025-11-10 , Saal A

Network operations engineers maintain the backbone of our digital experiences, ensuring robust connectivity and managing complex routing. Yet, even with great network health, where are the current limits of today’s routing technology? What does it mean when your manager calls you and says “Our customers can’t watch Netflix!”? Can we measure how the end users experience the high variety of OTT-services, beyond classical speedtests? In this talk, we will investigate real-world scenarios where network issues, even seemingly minor ones, impacted video QoE. We'll demonstrate how solutions to these problems often go miles beyond classic NOC-room resolutions, requiring a deeper understanding of streaming protocols, user-centric performance, and QoE. Drawing on insights from standardized QoE metrics, we'll demonstrate how understanding the user's perception of video quality provides a critical new layer of visibility. This talk aims to equip network engineers with insights to proactively diagnose and address the hidden causes of poor customer video experience.

Alexander began his "network path" at Deutsche Telekom in 2015, where he quickly took responsibility for end-user quality assurance and network benchmarking. His core work focused on building automated systems that simulate real user interactions with public OTT services, analyzing behavior within the browser and across the network. During this time, he developed monitoring solutions that provided ISPs with deep insights into end-user perception of various OTT platforms. After graduating with his Master's in Computer Engineering in 2018, he co-founded AVEQ with former Deutsche Telekom colleagues. His mission is to empower ISPs to understand the true user experience and deliver excellent service quality.