A Double Dose of IP QOS

Light Reading is serving up a double dose of information on IP QOS (quality of service) today, with the publication of a report covering the basic issues facing service providers and with a free Webinar (online presentation) reviewing the latest developments in silicon chips supporting QOS in telecom equipment.

The report -- IP Quality of Service -- says that the argument over whether QOS is needed in IP networks has subsided for the moment. The folk promoting the "big pipe" idea of simply throwing bandwidth at the whole issue of guaranteed performance have gone quiet (although they haven't gone away), and the real debate now centers on how and where to implement QOS.

Having said that, the report goes on to demonstrate one of the main arguments against QOS -- that it can be fiendishly complicated, and that this can undermine the economic case for employing it in the first place. It also notes that the whole idea of QOS -- enabling telecom operators to offer different grades of service at different prices -- only really works on closed networks right now. Efforts to extend performance guarantees over multiple networks are in their early stages.

All the same, plenty of operators are looking to QOS as a way for them to start generating profits from their IP infrastructure. The report, authored by Graham Finnie, an independent consultant, steps through the technologies that promise to make this possible, outlining recent developments.

Today's Webinar takes things several steps further, by drilling down into the details of how QOS is implemented in telecom equipment using so-called traffic manager chips, a type of network processor. Latest developments in this field are reviewed.

The main presenter in today's Webinar is Simon Stanley, founder and principal analyst at Earlswood Marketing Ltd., a U.K. consultancy, and presenter of several other Light Reading Webinars on different types of communications chips and subsystems. The other speakers come from the event sponsors -- Azanda Network Devices and Motorola Inc. (NYSE: MOT).

There's still time to register for today's Webinar, which will be staged at 2PM Eastern time, 11AM Pacific time. Click here to register, and remember to tune in early to avoid the rush.

— Peter Heywood, Founding Editor, Light Reading
www.lightreading.comWant to know more? The big cheeses of the optical networking industry will be discussing QOS at Lightspeed Europe. Check it out at Lightspeed Europe 02.