Most people don’t give their networks a second thought until something stops working — a video call lags, a streaming movie drops in quality, a remote work session freezes. The interruption may last only a few seconds, but that doesn’t lessen the user’s frustration. For broadband operators, those moments of frustration show up as support calls, truck rolls and, ultimately, customer churn.
Today’s digital experiences depend on reliability — and coordination across applications, devices and networks. But those systems still operate with limited shared visibility. Applications understand session quality. Networks understand infrastructure performance. What’s missing is a shared, real-time view of the user’s experience that connects those two perspectives.
This is the gap CableLabs is working to close with Quality by Design, or QbD. QbD is a framework that allows networks and applications to share performance data in real time to improve user experience. The goal is to identify experience issues as they happen and resolve them automatically.
CableLabs recently completed a pilot with Zoom to test this approach in a real environment. The pilot demonstrates what becomes possible when applications and networks stop working in isolation and start sharing live performance insight.
Why Experience Is Still Hard to Manage
Broadband networks have made tremendous progress optimizing for speed and capacity. But speed alone doesn’t define user experience. For real-time applications like video conferencing, latency, jitter and packet loss often matter far more than peak throughput.
At the same time, applications have become increasingly sophisticated at measuring session-level performance. They can detect drops in video quality, freezes and audio issues. What they typically lack is visibility into network conditions at the exact moment those issues occur, particularly across in-home Wi-Fi and access networks.
The result is a fragmented view of the user experience. Networks see infrastructure behavior without application context. Applications see symptoms without network awareness. When something goes wrong, troubleshooting tends to be reactive and incomplete.
What Quality by Design Changes
QbD bridges that gap by enabling real-time, two-way data sharing between applications and networks. Instead of inferring what might be happening, both sides can exchange concrete performance metrics during an active session.
In the Zoom pilot, the application acted as a “client-as-a-sensor,”network monitor, sharing metrics such as latency, jitter, packet loss, mean opinion scores (MOSs), Wi-Fi signal strength and video resolution via Zoom’s client-as-a-sensor feature. We then combined that application-level insight with network telemetry, creating a unified view of performance in real time — allowing the technology to meaningfully improve the user experience without compromising privacy.
The data shared is session-based and doesn’t include personal or identifiable user information. The goal is visibility into experience — not visibility into users.
Why Real-Time Visibility Matters
One of the most meaningful outcomes of the pilot was enabling the shift from after-the-fact analysis to in-the-moment awarenessjust-in-time resolutions. Today, many experience issues are diagnosed only after a session ends. Logs are reviewed, tickets are opened and engineers try to reconstruct what happened.
With QbD, poor or degrading performance can be identified while the session is still underway. During the pilot, this enabled just-in-time actions such as prioritizing video conferencing traffic over other in-home traffic when conditions degraded. Instead of generic warnings, networks and applications had enough context to respond in a targeted way.
For users, that means fewer interruptions and faster resolution. For operators, it means clearer root-cause identification. For application providers, it means deeper insight into how network conditions affect real-world performance.
Scaling Beyond Telemetry-Ready Applications
Currently, not all applications can share real-time telemetry. To extend QbD more broadly, CableLabs is collaborating with Meta on the next iteration of the framework. This phase introduces advanced fingerprinting and benchmarking techniques that allow experience quality to be inferred even when applications can’t directly expose metrics. These methods preserve privacy while expanding participation across the ecosystem, laying the groundwork for adaptive, context-aware networks that improve over time.
Advancing Toward Self-Optimizing Networks
Today’s online experiences are about more than delivering speed. Quality by Design is a foundational step toward networks that can sense, evaluate and adapt automatically. It shows what becomes possible when applications and networks share responsibility for the user experience. By combining real-time telemetry with agentic AI, context-aware networks can begin to self-diagnose issues and adjust behavior dynamically.
CableLabs invites operators, application partners and technology vendors to participate in the next phase of interoperability testing and framework expansion. Because no single party has a complete view of the user experience on its own, QbD only succeeds when we collaborate — and the time to start is now.
