Assured service quality for the future Internet ecosystem : an analysis of service scenarios and a market quantification

Some innovative, highly requiring applications (e.g. YouTube videos) have a significant impact on network traffics and economic relations between operators and third parties. Although the Internet has been evolving, it has not yet generated application traffic with very high capacity demands, or guarantees on security or time response, thus not meeting some customers’ expectations. In the current situation, seeking to offer ASQ services and benefit both NSPs and end users, ETICS project has been initiated in 2010 to propose new business, regulatory, pricing and accounting models for network interconnection services, which would enable a sustainable ecosystem for all actors of the value network. Within ETICS project, this thesis is aimed at providing an economic perspective of an ASQ solution for the delivery of end-to-end multi-carrier network services. This is achieved by quantifying future markets where the introduction of ASQ interconnection will most probably impact and attain demand. The potential markets were split into four broad categories: high-definition (premium) person-to-person rich multimedia communication; off-net (premium) content delivery; inter-provider ASQ connectivity for business customers; and consumer cloud services. Each individual market was quantified as a stand-alone process, and, at the end, they were all merged into one final analysis so as to obtain an overall understanding of ETICS impact on interconnection services and provide operators with an insight into the economic and financial viability of ETICS solution. The achieved results for ETICS revenue and market share were positive and suggest that an ETICS ASQ offer could be commercially promising, especially for some markets that are already served by NSPs, such as VPN.