Getting what you paid for: quality of service and wireless connection to the internet

'Quality of service' (QoS) has risen in importance for controlling and measuring the transfer of information over communications networks as they have migrated from individual-links to interconnected-networks (and indeed to the Internet itself). Charging for services contributes to the requirement for prescribed levels of quality. Two different basic paradigms for communications networks are used, circuit-switched and packets-switched. The difference between these two have a significant impact on performance and hence on QoS issues. The Internet uses packet-switched and different QoS solutions have been standardised, IntServ and DiffServ. The mobile communications sector currently uses circuit-switching but is migrating to a packet-switched basis. This paper briefly reviews these developments and looks at possible future developments.