It may seem counterintuitive to be offer better Quality of Service (QoS) as a Service (aaS), but LiveQoS of Ottawa, Canada has launched just such a offering.  The LiveQaaS (Quality as a Service) platform enhances quality of experience (QoE) for mobile devices and cloud applications by maximizing performance over slow networks, regardless of type.

“We designed LiveQaaS to be easily embedded on mobile devices, or integrated with mobile cloud applications using a simple API,” said Martin Horne, LiveQoS CEO.  “Mobile device manufacturers and mobile application developers have told us that WiFi and 3G/4G networks have inconsistent quality, resulting in unhappy users."

Started in 2009, LiveQoS  first licensed its technology to other hardware, software and service vendors, including HP and RCS cloud provider JiveMobile.  

"Our target markets are pretty much any mobile device manufacturer, " said LiveQoS CEO Martin Horne. "Anything in real time we're good at."

QoSLive uses three different processes to improve network performance. Protocol acceleration and optimization of TCP and UDP is the first step, with potential benefits of up to 5 times the performance improvements between a mobile device and a server. Wi-Fi prioritization can offer twice the speed of a generic Wi-Fi stack down at the local Starbucks.   Packet loss recovery with forward error correction (FEC) is last layer of improvement, both improving network performance and mobile device battery life since the device doesn't have to burn time and energy by having to ask for and receive dropped packets. The service continually monitors network, drive, and application, adopting the optimizing processes to fix problems immediately. 

Running the QoS/QoE technology as a service proves to be easier than one might think at first glance.

"What if we can get really close, like Amazon or Rackspace, to the backbone of the Internet," Horne said. "We can redirect from Amazon to YouTube."

Operating at a cloud "hot spot" means LiveQaaS can deliver fast response times between mobile clients and its core servers and redirection processes, with short hop transits from fast cloud to desired services.   It's a clever loophole to get high-speed performance without having to build a dedicated network and a bunch of peering/transit arrangements.

Alternatively ,enterprises and OEMs such as HP can (and do) implement LiveQoS for themselves, creating a server implementation on their favorite cloud -- internal or third-party) and then distributing the stack to mobile devices.

To date, LiveQoS solutions have been deployed by "8 big" firms, including the abovementioned HP and JiveMobile. Another RCS customers is expected to be announced in the future and the pipeline is "quite strong" in cloud services, especially storage vendors.

I've already seen one real-world working example of LiveQoS .  Metaswitch incorporated LiveQoS's technology into a softclient it demonstrated at its 2012 Orlando, Florida Forum event. The client performed better than a comparable Skype-esque implementation over cellular and Wi-Fi networks through the use of FEC and other tweaks.