Quality of Service (QoS) is an area where national public authorities traditionally have exerted an influence. It is also an area where international negotiations on standards have played an important role. In developing countries, the problems of QoS are among the biggest issues in telecom. Often quality is poor on all parameters, e.g. outage, repair time, voice quality etc. In the present subsection, being part of a presentation of the new regulatory paradigm, focus is on QoS in packet-switched networks. The first question in this connection is whether and to what QoS issues have changed with the transitions from circuit-switched telephony to the present and future multi-service packet-switched environment. The second question is whether there is a need for public regulation regarding QoS and, if so, which kind of regulation. In this connection, there are two different areas to consider: QoS in relations between the operators, e.g. in interconnection agreements, and QoS in relationships between operators and end users.
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IP QoS