INTERNATIONAL TELECOMMUNICATION UNION ITU-T RECOMMENDATION SUMMARY Rec. No. : E.432 Title : Connection quality Study Group : II - Network Operation Version : New Date of adoption : 1992 Notes : Recommendation E.432 suggests parameters, measurements and standards to capture the customer perception of connection quality for all services on the public switched telephone network (PSTN) and the evolving integrated services digital network (ISDN). In principle, when a new service is to be implemented, a market analysis has to be undertaken to gain information on the service quality that has to be offered to the users at a given tariff. Here a problem appears to arise: users show their satisfaction in a non-technical way: they judge connection quality ranging from poor to excellent. The same problem applies to existing services. The intention of Recommendation E.432 is to provide a guideline to obtain end-to-end connection of acceptable quality, that satisfies the end users. In considering "connection quality", it is important to recognize that the "user" must already have a complete end-to-end connection, i.e. a distant end answer signal has been received before the connection quality can be assessed. "Connection quality" does not include call set-up delays, etc. The "connection quality" has to be considered from the users perspective and will be influenced by the subjective perception of the user, the destination and route chosen, the transmission media used and the total ressources available and applicable to the end-to-end connection. As a result, Recommendation E.432 considers the user perspective first, and then develops the network parameters and objectives. To order the complete text of this Recommendation, please use the Order Form for ITU-T Recommendations. An electronic version of this form is available on ITUDOC (Winword: UPI=ITU-5265; ASCII: UPI=ITU-2488).