Highlights:
- In the race to lower latency and faster download speeds, upstream performance is too often overlooked. We commonly see bandwidth disparities of 4:1, meaning that a ship with an average downstream rate of 100 Mbps may only be achieving an upstream rate of 25 Mbps. This can impact customers’ ability to upload and share content.
- Without measuring upstream performance, cruise lines often aren’t aware of the issue – but it can negatively impact customer satisfaction and NPS.
- Neuron provides cruise lines with a way to clearly measure and understand their upstream performance as well as the tools to intelligently manage it.
Imagine: You’re on a cruise in the Caribbean. The amenities and service onboard are fantastic. The views are even better. The ship touts its new “state-of-the-art” Wi-Fi service, having recently added LEO satellites to the mix. You tee up the perfect post to share this experience of a lifetime, but when you try to upload it, the app stalls.
Even with a good mix of connectivity services onboard, if the ship’s upstream performance is poor, posting a short HD video on Instagram Stories or TikTok under 40MB could take between 15 to 30 minutes to upload. A larger 4K file of up to 100MB could take half an hour or more. Suddenly, your app’s quality of experience (QoE) has degraded, the thrilling moment has passed, and with a bit of annoyance, you’ve given up on the post you’d hoped to upload nearer to real-time.
In the race to lower latency and faster download speeds, upstream performance is too often overlooked. For the best all-around network performance and QoE, it is important to start measuring and prioritizing upstream performance.
Complete Performance Measurement
Upstream refers to the transmission of data from a person’s device back to the network. Satellite bandwidth tends to be asymmetrical, with downstream rates often proving to be faster, more reliable, and to have greater capacity than upstream.
We commonly see bandwidth disparities of 4:1, meaning that a ship with an average downstream rate of 100 Mbps may only be achieving an upstream rate of 25 Mbps.
Traditionally, download speeds were prioritized for browsing, streaming and downloading. However, with the rise of social media, remote work, collaboration tools and cloud services – not to mention, higher customer expectations – upstream capacity has become crucial too.
The first step in finding the right balance between upstream and downstream capacity is by measuring performance for both separately. But in reality, few companies are actively measuring their upstream performance and adjusting bandwidth ratios accordingly.
The Role of AI and ML
During the early development and testing of the Neuron platform, our engineers observed an interesting anomaly on a ship: our QoE scores were high, but there was an issue uploading content on social media – and it was showing up in customer feedback.
The team discovered that a cap on the ship’s upstream capacity was impacting uploads. While this issue wasn't significant enough to affect the ship's overall QoE scores, it notably impacted customer satisfaction. To measure upstream performance, we built machine learning models that analyze a variety of inputs, like network performance, application requirements, and end-user utilization metrics. We then correlate them to create an Upstream QoE score.
The QoE scoring system is available with our Neuron Pulse solution, providing cruise lines with a holistic view of their upstream performance. It pinpoints the data impacting scores and offers insight into related issues and trends over time, allowing problems to be quickly addressed and QoE to become predictable. This equips the cruise line to work with their service providers to find the right balance between their upstream and downstream needs.
To take it to the next level, cruise lines can use Neuron Grid, our AI-powered network management solution, to remove upstream limitations. Grid analyzes the ship’s traffic patterns and trends to predict future demands on the network, dynamically orchestrating traffic over the right service at the right time for the best QoE.
High QoE, Without Limitations
With the right solutions in place, we’ll see a shift toward symmetric bandwidth, opening the door for new, high-quality digital experiences at sea. To learn more about the Neuron platform, get in touch with our experts!
