Quality of Service and Service Provisioning on a Competitive Market

The objective of this paper is to provide an economic and commercial context for QoS research in open distributed environments. The analyses are based on a telecommunications value chain model. The model is used to define possible roles for telecommunications companies, migrating from traditional telephony network operators towards privatised ICT companies in a new economy. Based on these developments, we advocate R&D activities aiming at standardised concepts and engineering principles to establish and control QoS in open distributed environments