“Have you ever you have …”
This phrase sometimes precedes a story about a difficult or difficult experience. For Internet users all over the world, this may be a bell: Have you ever extinguished Wi-Fi on your phone to prevent calls from declining when leaving home?
Many people who read here can be associated with this scenario. Why this?
This is because the mobile devices tend to adhere to Wi -Fi (whether at home, in the office or anywhere else) for a very long time, and often turns into cellular when the time has passed. This can lead to audio calls and data connections that stop for 20 seconds or more. This “sticky” behavior has been present since mobile devices were combined into the first Wi -Fi and cellular radio devices.
The problem stems from a basic feature of mobile devices, which follows the “Wi-Fi First” approach. However, the problem is exacerbated due to the lack of a uniform mechanism to seamlessly move between the Wi-Fi network and cellular networks, making users vulnerable to disorders.
How does this affect the end user?
In the digital age today, we rely heavily on mobile devices for everything – from video calls, broadcasting services to work online and social interactions. However, many users face a frustrating experience: when moving between the Wi-Fi cellular networks, their devices are often struggled to maintain a stable connection, leading to decreased calls, hidden videos or lost data sessions.
This lack of smooth communication not only disrupts the user activities, but also affects service quality perceptions, which completely disrupts Wi-Fi or turns into less efficient networks.
How can we improve the experience?
In cooperation with member operators, Cablelabs works to describe the weak user experience that this problem creates and understands the extent of its occurrence.
Our field tests include hundreds of video calls for video calls, testing video recall applications and making audio calls via devices from manufacturers and operating systems. We evaluated the user experience based on vocal dropouts, video and freezers, and we dropped the calls, and we collected the results.
Our members have also analyzed hundreds of millions of Wi-Fi signal databases during the times when the Wi-Fi phones move to cellular networks. We have even made surveys with actual customers to collect visions in their experience when leaving Wi-Fi coverage.
What did we find?
A long short story, the problem is real. It is annoying for users and happens frequently. Our test sheds light on the extent of this problem as shown below.
Most of the devices we have experienced for long periods (usually between 19 and 54 seconds) of the bad sound, the sound and/or the frozen video were dropped during calls. Standard voice calls were only between 10 and 13 seconds of bad sound during the transition from Wi-Fi to cellular. From the recovered signal data index analysis provided by the RSSI, RSSI is low enough for the cause of problems with Wi-Fi voice calls 60 percent of the time when moving from Wi-Fi to cellular. When using other application problems, 40 percent of the time is likely to occur. About half of the users surveyed manually replaces their mobile devices between Wi-Fi and Cellular at least once a week, with 44 percent of these users who have problems while moving.
The result is clear: Without the non -welcoming network transitions, user experience, reliability decline and increased dissatisfaction.
While standards development organizations have made some developments, especially for the Wi-Fi network call, these solutions have not yet been addressed after the challenges of cumin and disruption during the network transfers of other applications.
What next?
This multi-faceted problem, given the various group of stakeholders-including devices sellers, operating system sellers (OS), sellers of a group of slices, and developers operators, each uses their own algorithms/main performance indicators to try to solve the Wi-Fi problem. The transition to cellular can once Wi-Fi begins to decompose to improve the user experience, but it will not completely solve the problem.
Cablebs is actively involved with all stakeholders in this field in an attempt to comply with a common and simplified solution aimed at enhancing the user experience. This will guarantee that we can face the challenges that users face today during network transfers in a consistent way, regardless of the user access network.
We are also working with industry sellers and standards institutions (such as the Wi-Fi Alliance) to test and develop solutions for non-welded communications that provide reliable and consistent experiences for users. If your company is a seller of mobile devices and wants to deal with Cablebs in this work, contact us to see how we can cooperate to achieve a smooth connection.
To read more about this matter and the Cablebs Action Group that addresses this problem, read the latest blog post, “Opening Smooth Communication”.
