Today ARCEP is publishing the results of the quality of service measurements performed on fixed services access in Q2 2014, along with the results of the quality of service measurements for fixed telephony services in Q1 2014. Publication of the first QoS measurements on internet access services, which was initially planned for today, has been postponed.
Since 2010, fixed electronic communications operators in France with more than 10,000 subscribers have been required to publish quality of service (QoS) performance indicators on their websites on a quarterly basis, along with the results of the quality measurements performed on fixed access to electronic communications networks. As a result, Bouygues Telecom, Free, Numericable, Orange and SFR all published their Q1 2014 performance indicators for fixed telephony service quality today, along with the second quarter findings on the quality of fixed access to electronic communications networks.
In addition to these procedures, with its Decision No. 2013-0004 of 29 January 2013, ARCEP introduced a system for measuring the quality of the internet access provided from a fixed location by the top five ISPs in France: Bouygues Telecom, Free, Orange, Numericable and SFR. Dedicated test lines were installed to this end, inside a technically-controlled environment whose conditions make it possible to achieve a high degree of comparison between operators, and a sufficiently broad representation of the various network access conditions that users encounter. The metrics obtained in this fashion concern seven performance indicators: four generic technical indicators (particularly throughput) and three indicators relating to specific types of usage: web browsing, streaming video and peer-to-peer file sharing.
A technical committee, managed by ARCEP staff and composed of independent technical experts, consumer associations and representatives of the affected operators, is in charge of monitoring these measurements. One of the committee’s goals is to enable the implementation of a system that delivers sincere, objective, representative and comparable measurements.
Because of its innovative nature, and the inherent risks when introducing any new system of this kind, ARCEP is being particularly careful to ensure the quality of the data that may be published on completion of this first round of measurements. This is why the Authority has chosen to postpone the publication of this information, which was initially planned for 15 October, until after another meeting of the technical committee, which will provide an opportunity to fine tune the analytical work being done on the accuracy and representativeness of the measured data.
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