Abstract:
Penetration of high-speed mobile data services including social media and video services
has been significantly increased across the globe due to fast development of mobile
network and smartphone technologies. A similar trend has also been seen in Ethiopia
mainly due to large mobile network expansion projects of the sole incumbent operator
ethio telecom, particularly for Universal Mobile Telecommunications System (UMTS)
network. To achieve a successful business, mobile operators need to continuously
monitor satisfaction of their customers and the quality of their networks to take timely
marketing, network optimization and other relevant decisions. While traditionally the
focus has been towards network Quality of Service (QoS), operators recently also provide
attention to the aggregate user quality perception – Quality of Experience (QoE). Yet, a
combined quality analysis for mobile networks in Ethiopia, particularly for the popular
UMTS data service, has not been performed. In this thesis work, the detailed QoS and
QoE evaluation for Addis Ababa UMTS data service including both network quality
perspectives and user side perception focused on selected enterprise customers are
presented.
Assessment of quality monitoring process in ethio telecom has been done before
conducting the evaluation on QoS and QoE. The evaluation is made based on download
throughput, upload throughput and latency quality metrics collected from network
management system (NMS), indoor walk test, crowdsourcing test using RTR-NetTest
tool and contextually formulated survey questionnaire. In general, achieved throughput
and latency results show that both QoS and QoE are not good and there is dissatisfaction
of customers. For instance, the average download throughput results are 0.57 Mbps from
NMS, 0.86 Mbps from indoor walk test and 2.53 Mbps from RTR-NetTest. These
quantitative results are reflected in the perception result of the participants where a Mean Opinion Score value of 2.65 for the satisfaction of downloading files or video/music is
achieved