HOW DO CARRIERS DELIVER SERVICE TO A GIVEN LEVEL OF QUALITY IN THE CONVERGED COMMUNICATIONS ENVIRONMENT?

Ian Parker, Technical Consultant at Imtech Telecom, explains why quality of service is all about control.


Service availability and transparent performance are the ingredients of a good quality of service. In practical terms, that means identifying traffic patterns, and prioritising it according to bandwidth needs.

Convergence makes things more complicated. In the converged environment there are an ever-growing amount of mixed applications passing through the carrier domain. The carrier needs to understand which traffic is causing a negative effect on the service quality and who is causing it.

The carrier may find that 20% of their customers use 80% of the overall bandwidth, so they need to ensure that a fair usage policy is defined. That way all customers have an equal share of the available paths. To achieve this, they will need to set up a system that identifies the applications being used, and by which subscribers, in order to understand the types of traffic that are causing congestion and degrading service quality.
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Only when the different types of applications are identified can the carrier plan and engineer its network. And only then can it provide a fair and equitable usage policy for all its subscribers.

At which point it doesn’t just increase service quality, it opens up the possibility of gaining more subscribers, on the same infrastructure, without degradation of quality.
In addition, as voice and video services gain popularity, the carrier can identify different services and apply various priorities. These priorities can ensure that the application quality changes according to the carrier’s strategy. It’s all about control. If the carrier has full control of their traffic they can do whatever they like with it to produce good or bad quality where applicable.