By Colleen Szymanik, Comcast
Assessing WiFi performance can be challenging, especially at scale. Most operators and service providers need provisions to understand the quality of delivered service to ensure customer satisfaction. In order to assess the service, we need to understand the requirements for consistent and reliable service offering over WiFi. Since WiFi can be used over both 2.4 GHz and 5GHz frequencies, they should be measured and assessed separately given there are different challenges per radio frequency. In this paper, each router that services a customer home will assume 2 connected radio interfaces. Once the 6GHz band is widespread, this will be an added (3rd) interface to quantify. Each connected client device, such as laptop or smart phone, will also have different bandwidth requirements to obtain the intended service, regardless of the connected interface. In this paper, we will talk through data sources and collected metrics. From those metrics, is it possible to make assessments at a aggregate level to infer reliable and consistent quality of service from poor or unusable service? Conversation pairings will refer to the transmit and receive between an access point (AP) and client device, such as a laptop. The idea here is to refer to this as a simple conversation. In order to have effective communication between both the AP and the station, the rules put in place by the protocols and the WiFi specification need compliance. Assuming compliance is met, measuring quality is the next step. WiFi quality depends on the specific conversation pairing requirements. Each pairing does not have the same time and bandwidth requirements, such as an IoT device compared to a 4K streaming device. They should not be treated the same when appraising the connection quality.