Internet vendors and service providers will gather later
this month to discuss the development of an industry-wide forum that will
focus on quality assurance protocols and standards.
The Quality of Service Forum’s first meeting will be held at the Internet Bandwidth Management
Summit on Nov. 16 in San Jose, Calif.
iBAND is a technical conference produced by Stardust Forums, covering new Internet
bandwidth technologies in enterprise and ISP networks. Featured topics
include switching, IP multicast, voice over IP, Digital Subscriber Line,
satellite, caching, and gigabit ethernet.
The QoS Forum will focus on emerging QoS protocols and standards such as
RSVP and DIFFSERV that are now being integrated into routers, switches,
edge devices and operating systems. The up-and-coming technologies offer
fine-grain control over application bandwidth use in IP networks and are
critical enablers of
multimedia-intensive Internet applications such as Internet telephony.
Especially important for ISPs, the technologies provide new and enhanced
classes of service and guarantees which can be rolled out to customers.
The QoS Forum aims to further industry education on products, services and
business opportunities offered by these new class of Internet technologies
and will provide interoperability testing and accelerate the deployment of
QoS solutions.
“Enterprise and ISP networks need more intelligence. They need to support
the guaranteed quality of service levels required for next-generation
Internet applications,” said Martin Hall, chief technology officer at
Stardust Forums.
“The creation of a QoS Forum will enable participating companies to
collaborate on creating and educating the market in a coherent way. It will
propel new QoS-enabled products and services onto center stage and
accelerate the acceptance of IP telephony and other latency-sensitive
applications. The market’s understanding and willingness to deploy QoS will
be a watershed moment in the history of the Internet,” Hall said.
The Forum will feature representatives from companies such as 3Com Corp.,
Cisco Systems Inc., IP Highway, Orchestream, Ukiah Software, IBM Corp. and
Fujitsu.
