Is anyone actually USING IP QoS?

Sun May 16 22:18:02 UTC 1999

There is so much hype and marketing going on about IP QoS
these days, it's hard to tell what's /just/ hype and
marketing and what's actually in production.

I'm wondering if anyone is actually using any of the IP QoS
features offered by various vendors in a production
environment.

I'm particularly interested to know if the famed replacement
of ATM QoS features (basic stuff, like prioritization,
traffic policing and traffic shaping, sustained and peak
rates) has happened in a native IP network (ie POS or IP
over PtP circuits), particularly one that runs multiple
services (like some real-time stuff like voice, video,
streaming, and some non-real-time stuff).

There have been a lot of announcements and rumors about this
kind of stuff (like Enron Communications PureIP network,
Convergent's fully-Cisco [possibly L3] network, Level3's
IP-only network, etc), but so far it seems like the only
people running native IP on their network don't need QoS at
the level that ATM provides, or aren't running any QoS. And
it seems like anyone who has built/is building a
multi-service network is using ATM because of the QoS
issues, amongst other things.

The presentations I've seen about QoS implementations have
all seemed to contain major sections about how the networks
had to work around problems or scale back the implementation
because of resource limitations (CPU, memory, etc). Haven't
seen anyone implement RSVP on a wide scale, due to similar
types of problems. Sounds like QoS is marketing material,
not the stuff networks are built on. Is that still the case?

How the heck are people able to deploy native-IP networks
with these kinds of limitations/problems with QoS? Or did I
miss something about QoS recently?

Pete.