QOS and QOE, RevisitedQOS and QOE, Revisited

In the slides for next Tuesday's webinar on Performance Management for IP Telephony (register here), Dr. Mike Hollier of Psytechnics has a great section where he discusses the importance of making sure your ability to measure performance keeps pace with the technology you're deploying. Since network management and monitoring deployments always seem to lag the core technology they manage, it's good to know where you're going--that is, what you'll be needing to measure and control in the next deployment phase.

In the slides for next Tuesday's webinar on Performance Management for IP Telephony (register here), Dr. Mike Hollier of Psytechnics has a great section where he discusses the importance of making sure your ability to measure performance keeps pace with the technology you're deploying. Since network management and monitoring deployments always seem to lag the core technology they manage, it's good to know where you're going--that is, what you'll be needing to measure and control in the next deployment phase.Mike focuses on the current generation, where the challenge is IP telephony/voice, and suggests that enterprises should be preparing for the next generation of traffic, which is going to be video, mobiles and softclient-generated voice. There will be a new set of quality challenges for this traffic.

If we have time to kill in the webinar--which we never do, actually--but if we did, I'd ask about instant messaging. Overall, IM has been a huge boon to our organization and I think most companies. It definitely makes us more productive and lets us communicate more efficiently than we did before.

But public IM certainly leaves a lot to be desired. We use Yahoo Messenger, which routinely seizes all of my PC's resources as it signs me out and back in apparently at random throughout the day. Latency sometimes makes an IM exchange the text version of the walkie-talkie effect you have with satellite phones, resulting not in people talking over other people, but strange two-track exchanges where you're conducting the conversation you initiated, at the same time you're responding to a totally different point the other person brought up while they were waiting for your messages to come through.

Some of this will never get solved, of course; it's in the nature of the medium. Yet I wonder whether any enterprises will conclude IM traffic merits a higher QOS rating, and whether better-engineered networks could deliver more coherent IM exchanges.