It ain't what you charge, it's the way that you do it: a user perspective of network QoS and pricing

Shared networks, such as the Internet, are fast becoming able to support heterogeneous applications and a diverse user community. In this climate, it becomes increasingly likely that some form of pricing mechanism will be necessary in order to manage the quality of service (QoS) requirements of different applications. So far, research in this area has focused on technical mechanisms for implementing QoS and charging. This paper reports a series of studies in which users' perceptions of QoS, and their attitudes to a range of pricing mechanisms, were investigated. We found that users' knowledge and experience of networks, and the real-world task they perform with applications, determine their evaluation of QoS and attitude to payment. Users' payment behavior is governed by their level of confidence in the performance of salient QoS parameters. User confidence, in turn, depends on a number of other factors. In conclusion, we argue that charging models that undermine user confidence are not only undesirable from the users' point of view, but may also lead to user behavior that may have a negative impact on QoS.