FAQs

  1. What is your company history?
  2. What does your company sell?
  3. What is the GoS Manager?
  4. What is the GoS Agent?
  5. What is GoS?
  6. When is GoS needed?
  7. Who is GoS for?
  8. What makes GoS better than other QoS solutions?
  9. Is QoS any use when it’s not end-to-end?
  10. Bandwidth is cheap. Why do I need to bother with QoS?
  11. Isn’t QoS just a question of standards?

  1. What is your company history?

    The company was founded in 2000 to commercialise research done at the Science Research Foundation (in Bristol, England) in collaboration with the University of Bristol and CERN, the European Centre for Nuclear Research. Since then we have worked with telecommunications industry majors such as Intel, Ericsson, Alcatel-Lucent and Nortel and service providers such as BT and AT&T to provide a range of products to meet the needs of 21st century networks.

  2. What does your company sell?

    Software. We have three products:
    - GoS: embeddable multi-service QoS enforcement
    - GoS Framework: scalable QoS/QoE solution

  3. What is the GoS Manager?

    The GoS Manager is central server software that provides a GUI and a ‘northbound’ interface to NMS/OSS systems, and interacts with distributed GoS Agents to configure and monitor them.

  4. What is the GoS Agent?

    The GoS Agent is an embeddable software module (that includes GoS) for measuring and enforcing QoS/QoE in telecoms devices.

  5. What is GoS?

    GoS is licensable software for multi-service QoS, designed for a vendor to embed into their telecommunications device. Its function is to manage the flow of packets towards one or more outgoing interfaces so that QoS policies are enforced. It makes multiple real-time applications work together in a congested network without any complex configuration. One of its main strengths is the independent control of various quality parameters: bandwidth, delay etc.

  6. When is GoS needed?

    When a device can't forward packets as fast as it receives and/or generates them, for example when one of its interfaces is a WAN or broadband link, and some packet streams have specific requirements on throughput, packet loss and/or packet delay. A specific example would be a customer premise WAN access device that has to deliver streams of VoIP packets mixed with data packets, and potentially other packets such as video, on the WAN uplink.

  7. Who is GoS for?

    Device manufacturers and designers who want to manage traffic across a link. For example: routers, firewalls, DSL gateways, voice telephony adaptors, DSLAMs, NodeBs, eNodeBs, 3G dongles, etc..

  8. What makes GoS better than other QoS solutions?

    It was designed from the ground up to support multiple simultaneous media applications - these are the things that really need good QoS. Other vendors’ solutions typically support only data QoS or one real-time application class, and don't achieve anywhere near the link efficiency that GoS can.

  9. Is QoS any use when it’s not end-to-end?

    Yes definitely. Almost all the congestion in a network happens at a few specific points, and managing QoS there helps greatly.

    However, if you do have the capacity to install GoS from end-to-end you can get a degree of predictability that's unmatched by any of our competitors.

    If you're not in the lucky position to dictate the QoS through a whole network domain, you can make GoS interoperate with whatever quality of service you've got in the core (e.g. MPLS).

  10. Bandwidth is cheap. Why do I need to bother with QoS?

    Several reasons:

    · Elastic traffic like TCP will try to fill all the bandwidth all the time, so you can't win by adding more bandwidth.

    · For traffic like VoIP the loss, delay and jitter characteristics are just as important as bandwidth and you can't protect those by adding bandwidth.

    · Bandwidth isn't cheap everywhere, e.g. wireless or DSL. (And remember that the cost isn't just subscribing to the extra bandwidth - you may have to upgrade all your other network equipment too to work at the higher rates.)

  11. Isn’t QoS just a question of standards?

    There are lots of standards, but these tend to focus on one or more of:

    · How packet streams can be classified
    · How QoS class/priority information is carried
    · How QoS policies are administered
    · How different classes of traffic are supposed to be treated

    What they miss out is how QoS policies are to be enforced (except in some cases where a very simple – and ineffective – mechanism is mandated). GoS is compatible with important standards such as DiffServ and provides a way to implement them efficiently.