Quality-based Services

The solution for high margin revenues?

By Barbara Lancaster

Quality of Service is definitely the hot new product in every telecommunications service provider's portfolio - wireless, wireline, cable and ISP. It's a straightforward, easy to understand approach that has been used successfully to justify the higher prices of some cars, stereo components, kitchen appliances and other consumer goods for years. Manufacturers whose premium priced products live up to their promises of high quality and great service enjoy excellent customer loyalty, measured by repeat sales, high profit margins and lots of referrals. As consumers and as corporations, we are comfortable paying more for guaranteed quality and reliability.

In the telecommunications business, we can borrow many of the strategies of the high quality, high price and high margin consumer goods sellers, yet we also must tackle some significant differences. Very few of our products are of the tangible variety. With the important exception of physical consumer components like handsets and headphones, the vast majority of telecommunications offerings are invisible to the end consumer. Quality in our world is largely driven by the performance of the network.

Perceived and Measured Quality

The perception of quality comes at the intersection of the network and the specific customer. With today's network technologies, we can have situations where every element is performing within acceptable parameters, yet the performance of the whole is unacceptable. Conversely, we can have situations where a network element is not performing well, but the overall performance for the customer is wholly acceptable. To ensure a high quality experience, we must be able to determine where a problem is, who it is affecting, and what SLAs may be in jeopardy. We must also use that information in real time to apply resources to fix the highest priority problems. Monitoring Quality of Service (QoS) is clearly different than just monitoring Network Performance.

It is therefore not at all surprising that QoS tools are as hot as QoS services. Companies like Quallaby, HP, Agilent, Spirent and Trendium enable the service provider to watch the intersection of customer-specific SLAs and network performance to help ensure that resources are allocated to resolving the highest priority service outages first. But this kind of sophisticated correlation may not be enough.

What Have You Done for Me Lately?

As consumers, we know that great, long standing reputations can be wiped out with one bad experience. To know how and when the customer experience will be negative, we need QoS tools that let us get even closer to measuring the actual customer experience. Tools from companies like NetIQ and Minacom enable the service provider to create something a lot like a User Acceptance Test. By building test scripts of IP Telephony events and having those scripts run on a scheduled basis, probes in the network can report back on specific performance details. In the IP Telephony world, these performance details are called Mean Opinion Scores (MOS). Look for MOS-like capabilities to become the next big thing for QoS in all types of telecommunications networks and all SLA-based services.

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