“Time is bandwidth”? Narrowing the gap between subjective time perception and Quality of Experience

Over the last couple of years, the scope of Quality of Experience (QoE) research has been constantly extended, most recently to the field of Web QoE in the context of HTTP-based applications. In this paper, we address the question whether it is sufficient to reduce typical Web QoE assessment scenarios to the temporal aspects of waiting for task completion, which would allow to attribute the resulting logarithmic laws to well-known psychological insights on human time perception. We demonstrate that while this attribution is valid for simple waiting tasks which are typical for simple data services like e.g. file downloads, the case of interactive web browsing is much more complex. We show that this is not only because technical issues prevent bandwidth and download time from being directly correlated with each other in a simple manner, but also because user perceived web page load times strongly deviate from technical page load times. Consequently, existing approaches towards assessment and modeling of web browsing QoE have to be critically reviewed and redesigned.