IFC Experience Monitoring
IFC Passenger Experience: Quality Matters
Commercial aviation passenger expectations for quality inflight Internet access are growing—and influencing their travel decisions. Inflight connectivity (IFC) service providers must meet or exceed these expectations. The first step is to know what passengers are experiencing. This requires measuring the actual in-seat connectivity experience—using that information to understand, manage, and tune the IFC service to ensure the best possible experience.
QoE vs QoS
While vendor-defined Service Level Agreements (SLAs) may be helpful to set expectations between a vendor and a business aviation operator, SLAs only monitor the Quality of Service (QoS) of infrastructure along a portion of the overall path. In contrast, Quality of Experience (QoE) is measured at the seat level, and captures the passenger end-to-end experience, encompassing the entire data path, not just the portion of the path between the aircraft and the ground station.
What we measure
We use four network performance metrics critical to measuring application performance.
- Latency
- Packet loss
- Domain name service (DNS) lookup time
- Effective bandwidth
QMap IFC Experience Monitoring
NetForecast’s QMap IFC Experience Monitoring performs active tests from an application installed on passenger or flight crew mobile devices, or on a hardware probe onboard the aircraft. The QMap application captures end-to-end latency, packet loss, DNS lookup time, and effective bandwidth data throughout each flight. When connected to the Internet, the QMap application continuously uploads performance and contextual data (e.g., flight position and altitude) to the QMap analytics engine, which creates near real-time reports of end-to-end IFC performance.
Hear from the experts
