A note from Joel Trammell, CEO, NetQoS.

Recently, there was an article by technical marketing manager Ben Erwin about why the company is named NetQoS, talking about the importance of Quality of Service policies.  While the message about quality of service as it is known today is important, there are a few things that should be corrected.

See, “Quality of service,” in the field of telephony, was defined in 1994 in the ITU-T Recommendation E.800 as the collective effect of service performance which determines the degree of satisfaction of a user of the service.

At the time of this definition it was believed that ATM (Asynchronous Transfer Mode) would be the future networking technology that would allow for combining voice, video and data traffic on the same circuit. ATM had by design many sophisticated traffic engineering approaches available within the protocol for ensuring QoS.

Over time IP (Internet Protocol) became the key competitor to ATM as a standard network protocol. IP’s only traffic engineering capability was the ability to provide differentiated classes of service. In an attempt to make IP seem similar to ATM, IP proponents began using the term QoS instead of the more technically correct term CoS (Classes of Service) to describe IP’s capabilities.

As IP won out in the marketplace over ATM a whole generation of engineers have come to believe that QoS and CoS are equivalent terms. NetQoS was named with the original, broader definition in mind.

(Also, the domain name NetQoS.com was available.  That was a big part of it too.)