QoE

Quality of Experience (QoE) is a measure of a user's overall satisfaction with a service, product, or system, reflecting how well it meets their needs and expectations. In telecommunications and online services, QoE focuses on the end-user perception of quality rather than the technical performance metrics used by operators. QoE is shaped by network conditions (bandwidth, latency, jitter, packet loss), device capabilities, application design and behavior, content type, and the user’s context and expectations.

QoE is distinct from Quality of Service (QoS). QoS describes network-level performance attributes, such as throughput and reliability, while QoE describes the user’s experience that results from the interaction of network performance, device, content, and usage context. Key components of QoE include perceived video and audio quality, startup time, buffering or rebuffering events, responsiveness, reliability, and ease of use. For media services, QoE is often estimated through objective models that predict subjective satisfaction, such as mean opinion score (MOS) or other quality models, as well as through direct subjective testing with user panels.

Methods to assess QoE combine subjective measurements and objective measurements that map measurable signals (latency, loss, encoding quality) to user satisfaction. Applications commonly addressed include video streaming, voice over IP, online gaming, and web browsing. In practice, QoE optimization targets smoother playback, faster startup, fewer interruptions, and consistent performance across devices and networks, guiding service design, network optimization, and user-centered quality assurance.