Customer Reviews

Technical, Commercial and Regulatory Challenges of QoS: An Internet Service Model Perspective (The Morgan Kaufmann Series in Networking)

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As an engineer working a lifetime in telecoms, first in a national telecoms-industry and then as a consultant worldwide for various service providers, I can recommend this book as a comprehensive and at the same time in-depth handbook for all matters related to Quality of Service - especially in the Internet. QoS represents today a wide and fast growing area covering all sorts of aspects from traditional traffic and Grade of Service measurements, reliability of network components and subsystems to data integrity and security, finally even setting standards and goals for the availability of network services and network performance.
Obviously, the Internet is developing into a global nervous system" for nearly all human activities (e.g. private, social, commercial, technical - soon nothing will be left out). A high standard of QoS becomes therefore more and more important and ultimately indispensible. Solid knowledge about QoS as provided by this book will soon be a basic requirement everywhere. Especially for all dealing with the Internet, to my opinion this excellent book should be considered a must-have.

I bought this QoS book recently and have just finished reading it. It is an interesting book and quite different from other "technical" QoS books. The book talks about some very important concepts and highly relevant to QoS implementation in the real world. I am in Australia, working for service providers, have been heavily involved in a number of QoS projects in recent few years. I find quite some people make things over complicated but not really serve the purspose.

On my recent trip to Paris, I have this book accompanied me. It's an excellent book for killing the long flight hours. It keeps me interested while at the same time delivers a very decent education on Internet QOS from technical, commercial and regulatory perspective. The author of the book is very good at:

1. Delivering a balanced coverage on each issue. The author stayed neutral (Or at least tried staying neutral) on many controversial topics. Pros and cons are iterated thoroughly and comprehensively from both sides.
2. Explaining the intricate, subtle and complicated relationships among technical, commercial and regulatory sides. I understand a good deal of QOS from technical perspective. But rarely an article or book does a good job explaining the challenge and difficult to market and regulate QOS. This book excels on this.
3. Picking good illustrative examples, cases and numbers. These examples and cases make the book fun to read too.

QOS is very complicated from the technical side, let alone to mix in commercial and regulatory requirements. It's a good academic and research topic but ill practiced by engineers and marketers. I feel, after reading the book, it'll be the case for a long time.

"The topic of QoS is all too often treated as a purely technical issue. In this refreshingly novel and comprehensive book, Xipeng Xiao draws on his own first-hand experience and that of other experts to put the technical issues in their correct commercial and regulatory context. This book is likely to make QoS much more understandable and relevant to a broad audience than it has been to date." Bruce Davie, Fellow, Cisco Systems

If you are interested in QoS and how Internet service will evolve, this book can be very helpful. Check the table of content at the discussion section of this page to see if it interests you. I highly recommend this book.