Nowadays, every application developed is built with the prime intention of providing a smooth and a friendly end-user experience. Latency-free services are highly prioritized in this network-centric era. Applications with high bandwidth consumption and business-critical systems entail ever more throughput and capacity.
However, the major demand arrives from the data-intensive sectors, such as online gaming, video streaming, stockbroking, commodities trading, and VoIPs. It’s really unruly to think of any business area that would not be benefited from improved network performance.
A bad end-user experience reflects the level of dissatisfaction which a customer has towards the product or a service after using it. A frustrating user experience can have multiple negative repercussions such as losing the customers permanently, shifting towards competitors, lack of engagement and negative reviews further questioning service provider image and credibility. A recent statistical study shows that about 88% of the smartphone users have negative user experience (Source: Keepitup). Moreover, almost 83% of the viewers have long lasting troubles in video buffering (source: conviva).
Network Latency and User Experience
Network latency and network throughput are the key factors involved in defining the network performance and eventually determine the speed of the network. While throughput is the quantity of data which passes from the source to destination in a specific period of time, latency is the time taken by a single data transaction to happen, which otherwise is the time taken by the data packet to travel to and from the destination back to the defined source.
Web application performance is directly associated with the end user, therefore slow or unstable performance is simply not an option when the end users are only a click away from uplifting their business. Knowing the users, locations they are coming from, and the devices/browsers they are using is of utmost importance when it comes to ensuring customer loyalty and growth.
It is important to know how the network impacts your end users. For that, there are a few performance counters and aggregates that you have to constantly measure:
- Packet Loss: It is the measures of the packets of data, lost during data transmission.The loss of data generates a negative user experience. It includes Issues like breaking-up of the voice communication, skipped video, extensive buffering and lag time in games.It is measured as a percentage.
- Network congestion: It is the output of an Internet route becoming too full when there are too many requests over a specific network route. It occurs when a network node carries excess data packets then it can actually handle. This could result in packet loss, often delays in service or a complete blockade of the new connections. It degrades end user QoS (quality of service) and also negatively impacts application performance.
- Network Jitter: It measures the variation in the arrival times of packets being received. It causes disruption in the normal sequence of sending data packets. Technically it is also known as “packet delay variance” and can be detrimental to the user experience. It is measured in milliseconds (ms).
The Datapath.io solution for improving the end-user experience
All these performance counters are important in understanding how the network really impacts the end-user experience. Hence, the key to troubleshooting network issues is to constantly perform Network Latency Test and further using Datapath.io´s unique solutions Network Performance Optimization (NP2) and Anycast to optimize the network and enhance the end-user experience.
