It's the Ecosystem, Stupid: Lessons from an Anti-Copernican Revolution of User-Centric Service Quality in Telecommunications

Following the tremendous technological evolution in telecommunications during the past few decades, which has culminated in the recent advances in mobile communications, especially the global introduction of 2G, 3G and 4G networks and their actual convergence with traditional fixed line communications and the Internet, in the mid-and long-term future technological progress in this field will be difficult to maintain at the current speed, while economic pressure due to market competition is expected to increase even further. We argue that, as an immediate consequence, this will lead to refocusing the scientific and commercial interest towards the end user. In this context, the current transition from Quality of Service (QoS) to Quality of Experience (QoE) will serve as a primary example. Therefore, in this position paper, we review basic motivation and framework as well as key steps and main outcomes of this somehow unparalleled paradigm change, which can be safely called an "Anti-Copernican Revolution", as it finally puts back the end user into the center of the technological universe. Deliberately abstaining from in-depth technical discussions, we end up formulating a set of seven succinct lessons learned from the past two decades of research on telecommunication service quality, and discuss their relevance also for other fields of systems engineering.