QOS or more bandwidth

Wed May 30 15:24:12 UTC 2001

Irwin Lazar <ILazar at tbg.com> writes:

> From what I've seen, there isn't a simple answer.  In places where bandwidth
> is exorbantantly expensive (such as outside the United States), simply over
> provisioning isn't an acceptable answer.  However, in some places in the
> U.S. & Europe, over-provisioning may certainly make more sense.

I think we're running into some semantic issues here.  What you call
"overprovisioning", I call "not underprovisioning" or "accurately
predicting growth".

There has never been a shortage of people willing to market
something-for-nothing schemes to the gullible.  Over the years, there
have been perpetual motion machines, gizmos that you put in the fuel
line to "magnetize" your gasoline and make your Eldorado get 50mpg,
and end-to-end QoS schemes.

If you were around for Peter Lothberg's presentation at nanog-last,
you know what I'm driving at here.

> In our area, we're also seeing a lot of pushback against the
> continued tearing up of streets to lay additional fiber,

If you put a reasonable amount of conduit in the first time (conduit
is *cheap*), there is no reason to tear up the streets again to put in
more fiber.  Most of the street-re-tearing-up that I've seen done has
been additional vendors, and no QoS mechanism that I've seen addresses
that little problem.

If you put in a reasonable amount of glass, and you're running low on
strands, metro area sparse-wdm schemes are getting cheaper all the
time, and presumably you can support their deployment because you have
high demand (else why are you running out of fiber?).

Notice that these are *quantity* of service mechanisms...

> so QoS may become the only option to meet required service levels.

Or you may have to face the fact that it is impossible to provide the
desired level of service at a price that people are willing to pay, in
your particular locality.  For instance, QoS schemes or no, I don't
think any of the major (or minor for that matter) players have plans
to put a datacenter on Pitcairn Island.

                                        ---rob