For mobile service providers, Quality of Experience (QoE) is today’s Quality of Service (QoS). The problem is, most service assurance tools are still operating under the old paradigm of QoS, the goal being to meet pre-defined service level agreements and key performance indicators (KPIs). This is a reactive approach rather than a proactive one, and just won’t cut it any longer.

In today’s mobile services market, successful providers are the ones that adopt a new paradigm of proactive service assurance.

“To truly meet the end-user QoE expectations that will accompany next-generation mobile networks and the advanced applications and services that end users will adopt, service providers need a proactive monitoring process that can identify, reduce, and help eliminate potential network service problems before they impact subscribers,” notes Alcatel-Lucent in a recently published whitepaper on QoE.

Proactive service assurance requires tools that are not only able to predict and rapidly isolate network problems, but also enable real-time resolution and extract intelligence from the network.

“From the end user’s point of view, the network should be available everywhere and anywhere,” Alcatel-Lucent says in its white paper. “It should allow instant connection from any mobile device, whatever that device may be. It should maintain voice, data, or multimedia connections as long as required. And, most importantly, every connection should support any type of traffic at the highest possible quality to enable the end user to experience voice, data, or multimedia services and applications exactly as expected.”

That might seem like a pretty tall order, but it’s what consumers demand—and they’re more than willing to switch providers if their expectations aren’t met.

“As noted in a 2009 report, 32 percent of end users who switch service providers do so because of poor service, dropped calls, or bad customer service,” Alcatel-Lucent says. “Of those, 14 percent switch because of poor service quality.”

Alcatel-Lucent added that a 2009 Yankee Group report “revealed that 95 percent of service providers surveyed agree or highly agree that average revenue per user (ARPU) can be increased by improving the QoE delivered to end users.

Alcatel-Lucent’s Proactive Care service is “designed to support ongoing, real-time monitoring and resolution of network issues. It is an intelligent solution built from the ground up to predict network outages before they occur.”

To learn more about proactive service assurance and QoE, read Alcatel-Lucent’s full white paper.