Quality-of-Service for Application Service Providers

This paper presents a very recent survey of the worldwide Application Service Provider (ASP) market. A questionnaire was sent out to ASPs and received answers were evaluated. The focus of the survey and the evaluation was to investigate on how ASPs are currently using Quality of Service (QoS) mechanisms and how they plan to do it in the future. The goal was to see the chances of success IP QoS mechanisms do have with their potential users. The survey showed that many ASPs are employing QoS technologies like ATM but only a few are interested in IP-based QoS. The question of IP-based QoS seems to be not important for ASPs, they use different technology instead. The major problem ASPs themselves are currently facing is the economical slowdown.