QoS for Tiscali VoIP

rpm

rpm

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QoS for Tiscali VoIP

Tiscali is offering quality of service (QoS) guarantees for it’s ADSL broadband for VoIP which were announced back in February.
mybroadband.co.za mybroadband.co.za

This might not look like a 'bold move', but in the world of 'best-effort broadband' I believe it is significant. This is a huge step in the direction of true 'service management' where one can get service level assurances on ADSL, cable etc. I think it will take a long time before we see this in SA, but it is good to see an international move towards broadband QoS.
 
Now we're talking! About bloody time, even though it seems somewhat cautious and tentative in nature...
 
I see a bigger picture here - issues of QoS are not just local ones. Like RPM, I find it significant that a multi-national has taken a tentative step towards addressing this issue, particularly as they're also local. This approach has in the past been reserved for corporate accounts only - methinx providers have finally realised that you cannot segment the market in this way if you're interested in long-term, sustainable business. After all, every corporate employee has a home with a potential or existing connection, not so? Locally this is particularly significant, as we have a limited corporate market with potential saturation sooner rather than later (860 000 registered businesses, if I recall correctly), whereas the potential residential and other non-business markets are many times this...
 
Hi MBS

Well said. Currently a fair amount of research is going into broadband service management, which involves QoS and SLA’s. These developments will make it possible to purchase specific services at specific times, like dedicated BW for video conferencing, turbo download speeds (turbo button) etc. A great deal must still happen before we will see these offerings, but Tiscali’s announcement shows that it might be closer than we think. I suspect the pricing structures will quickly move from flat rate services to cost-per-meg, but this is not necessarily a bad thing as long as the pricing is affordable. This is obviously mostly speculation, and it will certainly be years before we see these services in SA!

Regards,

RPM
 
Good points, RPM. I was involved in an envisioning discussion not too long ago about exactly this aspect, with the general consensus being that QoS issues will in fact serve to differentiate service offerings, and not necessarily the licensing or regulatory regime, nor discounted price offerings. Another conclusion reached which differs substantially from yours, is that unit costings will not be the de facto price model, but instead flat-rated services as package deals, coupled to specific service levels (24x7, 12x7 and 8x5). The discussion focussed on an assessment of competitive advantage in the 'liberalised' environment, and how this could be leveraged for developmental purposes. The Tiscali announcement is clearly particularly significant within this context - methinx a number of other players will follow suite. I'm particularly waiting to see what the big players will do - the likes of IS, UUNET and Datapro...
 
I agree that there is some significance in this move by Tscali in the UK, however I don't see any of the local yocals following suite until they are liberated from their reliance on Telkomonopoly controlled bandwidth. What would be preferable is if the locals had their own SLAz with Telkomonopoly, so if the monopoly messes-up it will pay penalties to the ISPz etc that pay Telkomonopoly for bandwidth & network usage. Actually I suspect that some such SLAz possibly already exist, but are cloaked in secrecy & locked away in a vault controlled by illuminati.org...
 
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