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Executive Summary

This is the second Deliverable of EURESCOM Project P702 and contains the final results made available for public use. It is aimed at engineers involved in planning Internet services for the PNOs, and particularly, if they need to offer Internet services with guaranteed Quality of Service or guaranteed bandwidth. The approach was successfully presented with demonstrations at EURESCOM and at the CeBIT fair, where considerable attention was attracted. The concepts presented were seen as being at the front edge of innovation.

The Deliverable describes the approach of the Project to allow Internet users to themselves make a choice that is a trade-off between Quality of Service and cost. This choice is then translated into a choice of networks and bandwidth. It elaborates on the demonstrator implemented for the Project and provides guidelines to PNOs.

The Deliverable can provide PNOs with additional ideas on ways to combine the best of two worlds: the store-and-forward Internet world and the switched world of traditional Telecoms. It shows how the traditional strengths of operators may be exploited. Both existing networks, such as (narrowband) ISDN and current and future advanced networks, such as ATM, can be integrated in the approach, allowing an immediate start with a potential for the future.

The basis for the efforts in P702 were QoS on demand by alternative trunking, thereby making use of circuit switched network technologies and IPv6. The Project has shown with experiments and actual implementations that QoS on demand is feasible and may be implemented now. In addition, the approach followed allows a smooth transition between current and future (virtual) circuit switched techniques. The Deliverable describes the application environment and the demonstrator set-up. Telebit and the University of Lancaster supported the Project as subcontractors to achieve the results and especially for the implementations.

The promising results of the Project suggest following up these ideas into new directions, such as multicast and scaling up to larger networks, including experimentation with a larger number of users. A further Project could bring the concepts behind the approach to a level that would allow PNOs to directly implement an "Internet with QoS Choice", providing customers with options and entering the market of real-time Internet services.