Network quality increases, so do user complaints

Paradoxe du réseauAdrien Escobosa

En passant du modem à l’ADSL puis la fibre, ou encore du réseau LTE a la 5G prochainement, les performances, les services (datacenters, SaaS puis Cloud) ainsi que la fiabilité des réseaux n’ont cessé de croitre. Pourtant, depuis quelques années, le nombre de plainte et l’inconfort des utilisateurs est en hausse et la tendance ne semble pas s’inverser, au contraire.

From modem to ADSL and then to fiber, and from LTE to 5G in the near future, performance, services (datacenters, SaaS and Cloud) and reliability of networks have continued to grow. However, for the past few years, the number of complaints and user discomfort is on the rise and the trend does not seem to be reversing, on the contrary.

Indeed, the finding of a quality factor that has also increased by 10 or 100 is offset by several factors that, when put together, can make life difficult on the Internet:

  • First of all, we have, with time and developments, made the networks much more complex. This implies that the percentage of chance of a failure is increased each time there is a new factor.
  • The number of transactions has increased between 1.000 and 10.000 times, which implies that the number of incidents has increased by 10 or 100 times.
  • Finally, on the users’ side, there are two problems: an increased intolerance to service interruptions or slowdowns and the inability to remember when and how the problems occurred. With the famous sentence: “The other day, nothing worked”.

 

To overcome this, several solutions are possible. The first one is to objectify user complaints in order to know when, how and why network problems occurred and especially if there was a problem that day. The second is to automate the processing: to diagnose, categorize and implement corrective and/or palliative measures to be able to deal with the volume of complaints and information to be processed by an IT team.