Wireless vs. wireline shootout: Howuser expectations influence quality of experience

Within QoE research it has become a generally acknowledged fact that user expectations can have considerable impact on subjective quality perception. In order to empirically quantify this influence we conducted a user study on expectations caused by the type of access network used. Study participants were asked to rate the QoE of various broadband services accessed via Internet connections labeled either as `wireless' or `wireline'. Our results show that for certain applications such as web-browsing, a considerable share of users rated differently in the wireless context than when (supposedly) using wireline, despite otherwise identical underlying technical network conditions. These and other findings demonstrate that dedicated studies on expectations can provide valuable information regarding the nature and impact of hitherto neglected QoE influence factors.