Scouts Notes (cont'd)

Management Tools
In Europe, in wireless, operators have started defining the necessary features to be built into switches and other things so they can be effectively managed. The OSS/J initiative is one example of this kind of work. We (Agilent) are in those forums as an integrator of different information – we are a source and aggregator of information. We have probes we build to augment OSS information one would get from various devices which often just give you generic info.

So, for example, Cisco will give you jitter and packet loss kinds of APIs, but 3 rd party guys are sniffing traffic. The key tool to have is a transaction builder, so that rather than measuring packet loss and jitter the tool is telling you what the measurements mean to the service or the transaction that someone is ordering. Unfortunately, there are no transaction builders or full cycle QoS tools built into the hardware devices, so these are things that you add on. You have to answer the question as to where you can monitor for quality – at the content, service or regional level? Even when an equipment vendor has a good strategy for this problem, its tools can be very fragmented. Most of what I do in a deployment is to bring together the various QoS metrics and means of measurement and spend a good deal of time to normalize nomenclature and translate between what the network devices are saying and what that means to services.

QoS Management
The reason for the focus on management tools and nomenclature is that there’s a greater premium on managing QoS than ever before. In Europe, bandwidth is a commodity market more than in the United States, and QoS is used as part of the service to barter for a better price or as a reason to change vendors.

The question for merging operators like AT&T Wireless and Cingular is around how to merge their QoS monitoring, measurement and management. Quite simply, they have different probes that don't talk to each other. To avoid these kinds of situations, European telcos are telling their equipment vendors that if they want to do business, they must provide unified KPIs along with tools and an information bus that allows the information to be gleaned easily. Improvements in QoS measurements and tools on-board network equipment look to be gathering strength because the requests are finally coming from the equipment buyers. I think in the long run this will affect the quality that customer experience positively.

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