Quality of service requirements recently have become more urgent for wide area wireless networks because of the increasing need for data and other multimedia services. QoS also is being propelled by the variety of technologies and platforms emerging for different applications.
“A few years ago, services were voice-centric,” remarked Laurie Armstrong, spokeswoman for Nokia Corp. “Now the networks are restructuring and, therefore, better able to scale and support new services and ensure better quality of service.”
Wireless experts say better QoS-knowing how the network will perform in a set of circumstances-will cut the number of dropped calls, make data exchanges far more efficient and utilize available bandwidth to manage streaming media.
“We are seeing a lot of growth on the voice and on the new feature services,” said Geoff Hollingworth, director of marketing for North America at L.M. Ericsson. “At the same time, the offerings are expanding in complexity, creating a need to control cost structures and deliver them as quickly as possible.”
At the moment, a lot of the services are targeted at the enterprise space, Hollingworth said. “People want to get their data when they want it.”
Three main network challenges are triggering the need for QoS, Hollingworth explained. The first challenge is choosing the right technology. He said carriers look to build and design the right solutions for their specific needs. Ericsson has unveiled the Ericsson Expander, which provides coverage and capacity to cope with demand as it grows and becomes more complex.
Meeting volume of demand is just a part of QoS value. It requires flexibility to track the geography of needs and traffic fluctuations based on time.
“Services and applications are evolving,” explained Armstrong, “and people can do more with their devices than just make calls.” Hollingworth said the reason QoS is gaining traction is “the reality of providing the best services.”
The second challenge for both carriers and vendors is time to market. QoS enables carriers to deliver their products at the right time to end users, creating more time for more products and gains in economies of scales.
“The starting point is to understand what services to deliver and segment the market in order to provide value,” Hollingworth said. He explained further that the company identifies systems to maximize deployments. He said this calls for the network to prioritize its offerings in terms of bandwidth and services.
“The carrier has business decisions to make,” he noted. “You monitor to ensure you deliver what you want to deliver.”
With a panoply of platforms in the wireless space, the focus is less on speed than on convergence, he explained. Translation: it’s about performance.
In this instance, performance refers to the “need to choose the best technology and design it the way you want,” thereby bringing the volumes of different offerings to the market in the best packages, he explained.
Industry uses the phrase ABC, which stands for always best connected, Hollingworth said, adding that while there will always be various access technologies, knitting them together is the big challenge.
“This allows the most appropriate network in the most appropriate area,” he said.
Armstrong said this calls for the industry to come together and pursue interoperability projects. Some major players are still trying to ensure one standard for some technologies, including Push-To-Talk over Cellular. QoS is not restricted to the network, however. Some companies are attacking it from the device angle. One such company is Comarco, which has unveiled a product known as QualiPoc. It is a smart phone-based system that “allows wireless carriers to get QoS … data from up to thousands of locations in order to assess user-perceived quality,” said the company.
The product runs on commercially available handsets. It also has an automated mode, explained Comarco, using a Web-based test manager that remotely controls and manages the phones in the network area, “testing voice, data and multimedia performance.”
