Is anyone actually USING IP QoS?

Wed May 19 12:31:22 UTC 1999

Jeremy Porter wrote:

> QoS outside of a private network is not ever going to be an economic
> reality, unless an RBOC buys up all the telephone companies or something
> equally stupid. (Its happened before.)

Um, there are a number of "public" networks delivering QoS today--they
just happen to be using layer 2 technology. Many of your telephone calls,
in your part of the country and others, are transported by "public" data
networks, and have been for years. You might not know, nor should you
care. It just works. Many major sporting events are also transported over
public data networks.

The underlying technology now exists to make this QoS capability available with
"public" Layer 3 networks. It will have significant bugs at first--just as Layer 2
networks initially did. But it will eventually become stable enough that businesses

depend upon it. The economic justification is in charging your customers more
for a higher level of QoS. It's been done before--just not for the Internet, yet.

> I'm not even convinced that from an engineering standpoint it isn't
> going to be cheaper for people with "short" local loops, to just
> always buy more capacity, than, ever drop any significant number of
> packets.

This is probably true. Just as bandwidth within an enterprise is cheap, short
local loop bandwidth will also be cheap for those with easy access to facilities.
It's the long haul where the real economic gains are.

>
> --- jerry at fc.net
> Insync Internet, Inc.          | Freeside Communications, Inc.
> 5555 San Felipe, Suite 700     | PO BOX 80315 Austin, Tx 78708
> 713-407-7000                   | 512-458-9810
> http://www.insync.net          | http://www.fc.net

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