Online demand and user experience under the epidemic

In his book The World is Flat, Friedman pointed out that the development of economic globalization has formed three waves, namely, labor-intensive globalization, capital-intensive globalization and knowledge-intensive digital globalization. Digital technology has had a profound impact on the global business environment. With the COVID-19 pandemic sweeping the world, online connectivity has become the topic of communication, while network problems have become the obstacle to business globalization.

Due to the surge in real-time online demand caused by the pandemic, the pressure on the global web to stream media and video conferencing is increasing. YouTube, Netflix and Disney+, among others, are being forced to reduce the resolution of their clients to reduce bandwidth pressure in order to prevent network congestion and avoid audio and video lag and blur. All kinds of video conferencing services rushed online were once a collective collapse.

Due to quarantines and travel restrictions caused by the pandemic, online entertainment outlets are seeing a surge of activity. According to southern Weekend, Chinese people spend 196 minutes a day on mobile apps on average, and 500 million people use e-sports games as one of the main ways to relax at home. However, the network download speed is slow, the game dropped, and other problems seriously affect the user experience. Cross-border e-commerce shopping suffers from slow response to orders, payment failure and other problems, and the loss of users will be very serious.

02 Network problems restrict the pace of enterprise business globalization

At present, business globalization has become the core strategy of many mainstream Internet companies. Content business has also become a hot spot of globalization, in the tide of Chinese enterprises have a lot of embodiment. Among the overseas Internet enterprises that take content as the trend, games, live broadcasting, online education, pan-entertainment and office collaboration have become popular options.

For business globalization, companies will focus more on operations, and the global service construction at the bottom becomes weaker. However, user experience is often stuck in the underlying infrastructure during the expansion of many businesses.

At present, when hardware configuration is highly redundant, the test of most interactive and action game applications is no longer the configuration of the machine. The core experience lies in the timeliness of operation feedback. Whether players in different regions of the world can get real-time experience is the most basic guarantee for game operators. In addition, multi-dimensional user demands, such as regional synchronization in different regions of the world, one-time success rate of users logging in to the game, and stability of the connection, require game operators to conduct more accurate demand dismantling and better technical response under the general “game experience”.

Audio and video live broadcasting tests the clarity and smoothness of live broadcasting. Once a single choice of video websites, it has become an option to have both fish and cake after the upgrade of user experience. How to ensure smooth audio and video access in different regions of the world is also a key issue, especially in southeast Asia and other regions where the telecommunications infrastructure service capacity is weak, but still provide smooth audio and video experience.

For cross-border e-commerce, financial and other scenarios, timely, stable and fast data synchronization services are more needed, which still requires the anti-attack capability of the bottom layer of Internet overseas application.

There is no QoS guarantee in native interconnection

The Internet is a best-effort network interconnection service. Its mission is to transmit data as much as possible, so it prioritizes connectivity and scalability, but does not guarantee the complete transmission of data, and does not guarantee the quality and priority of QoS such as delay and reliability of users.

The Internet is composed of regional networks without centralized management and scheduling mechanism. Global network transmission needs to span multiple networks. However, each area is operated and maintained by different ISPs. Different ISPs have different levels according to the scale and nature of service provided, and there are different data routing rules between ISPs at different levels.

Isps at different levels interconnect

太 阳 太 阳 Direct connection (太 阳) and Transit between ISPs is more efficient relying on BGP. This organization ensures scale and scalability, but at the expense of the availability and quality of end-to-end network communication.

On the one hand, BGP is not designed for continuous congestion, packet loss, sudden traffic, large delay network problems, such as inspection, found that as long as can pass to continue along the old path to send, although the parameters such as packet delay jitter on the network has been seriously deteriorated, the experience of most applications will be very bad, cannot use the application of real-time and quality sensitive. Assuming that the bandwidth congestion from Shanghai Telecom to LA of the United States causes packet loss of up to 30%, and the bandwidth is rich from Shanghai Telecom to Hong Kong without packet loss, BGP cannot abandon direct connection and transfer from Hong Kong carrier to LA of the United States to improve the quality.

On the other hand, it takes a long time for BGP to recover when a path is unavailable. Experiments show that 10% of paths cannot achieve 95% availability, 35% of paths have less than 4 9s (99.99%), 40% of paths take more than 30 minutes to repair, and 5% of paths take more than 2 hours and 45 minutes to repair.

Therefore, the routing architecture of the Internet backbone network is optimized for relatively simple and high scalability. It has successfully supported the geometric growth of the Internet scale in the past decades, but the price behind it is that it cannot quickly provide network transmission with QoS protection.

At the same time, from the perspective of user network access, WiFi, 3G, 4G, 5G and other access modes make the problem of access network more complicated. 3G, 4G, and 5G wireless signals are unstable due to regional influences, and their upstream and downstream bandwidths are limited. WIFI is limited by equipment, suffering from uneven performance, intermittent signal, serious interference and other problems. At the same time, the access network has a high reuse ratio and congestion problem in peak period.

When using the Internet to provide best-effort network interconnection services, varying degrees of packet loss, latency, and bandwidth limitation may be encountered depending on the current load. However the existing including audio and video communications, online games, mobile financial, enterprise global office, remote collaboration, cross-border electricity, across network iot data message synchronization across regions, and all kinds of sea applications and overseas users to access the domestic source station, etc., require network transmission has a precise definition of real-time and availability, these applications need to have more powerful QoS guarantee.

04 Technical challenges behind QoS assurance

When we disassemble the requirements of different scenarios above, we can summarize some common demands to see what challenges the QoS guarantee of Internet applications needs to face under the business globalization.

Challenge 1: Global network infrastructure is uneven, cross-network latency is high, and weak networks affect user experience.

According to Speedtest’s global Internet speed ranking for December 2020, China’s mobile Internet speed is the fourth fastest in the world, three times the global average. In parts of India, Africa, Central Asia and Southeast Asia, the average Internet speed is only one-tenth that of China, equivalent to the 3G era in China. Most domestic APPS will face common weak network problems when going to sea. For example, bandwidth is limited, peak hours are congested, and packet loss is serious. Put forward higher requirements for end-to-end protocol optimization and service optimization.

Data interaction interfaces between carriers are complex, which increases the latency of cross-carrier access. In transnational connections, international sea cables are scarce resources, and the bandwidth of trans-regional services is limited and congested at peak times. In addition, route negotiation between carriers depends on manual configuration. Configuration errors sometimes occur, resulting in traffic black holes.

Challenge 2: High cost of building distributed deployment with high quality access across regions.

Based on the construction of cross-region access of dedicated line, the cost of single M is more than 1000 yuan, and the charging model of dedicated line and expansion mode cannot support the rapid and elastic expansion of business. With the high cost of hard infrastructure, better underlying software technology is needed to reduce the cost. However, the low cost of software brings a large investment in human resources, which requires enterprises to play more games in business development.

Challenge 3: Limited public cloud coverage and high multi-cloud complexity.

Public cloud channels are often restricted by network bandwidth, node layout and other factors, and cross-border business access still faces many difficulties. Overseas enterprises are in different industries and have different business requirements. Moreover, there are also great differences in laws and regulations and IT infrastructure construction in overseas countries and regions. Public clouds mostly cover areas in developed countries, but not in remote areas, especially in Africa, South America and Central Asia.

Most enterprises choose to deploy their business in the cloud, which is bound to add complexity. Some are multi-cloud service providers across regions, some are multi-cloud service providers in the same region, and there are more complex combinations of operator network lines behind them. Complex cross-network problems of telecom operators and cloud service providers have become challenges to regional coverage.