QoS: Measurement and Evaluation of Telecommunications Quality of Service

• Authors: William C. Hardy;Luis Cardoso
• Venue: QoS: Measurement and Evaluation of Telecommunications Quality of Service
• Year: 2001

From the Book:My involvement in analysis of quality of telecommunications services began almost by accident in June, 1967, when I started my first full-time job out of graduate school. The job was with the Operations Evaluation Group of the Center for Naval Analyses. It seems that what they happened to need the day I reported was someone to fill a slot as a communications analyst. Since I was there, I was anointed, never mind that I knew absolutely nothing about telecommunications systems, electrical engineering, or even electricity, since I had skipped that part of the college physics curriculum, and almost nothing of my graduate education in mathematics was relevant to understanding Navy tactical voice and teletype communications over radio frequency channels.Because my career started with such a complete lack of practical experience and technical skills, my analytical efforts have never been marred or impeded by technical expertise or conventional wisdom. Rather, what I discovered was that all I really needed to do to be effective as a problem solver in this area was to: Imagine myself using the system I was studying; Decide what I would be concerned about if I were using it; Research the technology of the system to the extent necessary to understand the mechanisms affecting performance of the system with respect tothose concerns; and Formalize the relationships between system performance and user perception of quality of service gleaned from this drill.When I did this, everything else needed to solve the problem would readily follow - the user view would suggest concerns; concerns would suggest measures of quality and effectiveness; understanding of the mechanismswould suggest measures of performance and their relationship to measures of quality; measures would suggest quantifiers; quantifiers would suggest data requirements; and so on, all the way down the analytical chain.This book is based on more than 30 years experience in successfully applying this approach in analyzing issues of quality of service of telecommunications systems to produce practicable solutions to quality problems. Because of the very basic nature of the approach, this book is apt to be viewed by some as being short on technical content and long on formulation of evaluative concepts and generic measures. However, I refuse to apologize for this, because the perspectives on quality of telecommunications services that I am trying to lay out here are exactly those that I would want all of my employees to share, were I ever to become the CEO of a telecommunications company, so that, for example:My marketing and sales forces would know how to communicate with customers in a way that would demonstrate their understanding of customers' concerns;My system engineers would know how to design my networks to satisfy customer expectations, rather than simply meet industry design standards;My operations managers would know the comfortable levels of performance affecting quality of services that must be achieved and maintained to assure user satisfaction;My service technicians would know how to troubleshoot user complaints with the same competence that they identify, diagnose, and correct technical problems; andEveryone involved anywhere in the company would have a very good idea of exactly how their day-to-day activities affect user perception of the quality of our services.To this end, what I have tried to present here is a treatise on the ways and means of measuring and evaluating telecommunications services that is simple and straightforward enough to be appreciated by anyone, but sophisticated enough to be informative and useful to telecommunications professionals. The only way you can judge whether I have succeeded is to turn the page...William C. Hardy WorldCom, USA