QoS/CoS in the real world?

Sat Jul 13 23:46:31 UTC 2002

Well, end of the week and the responses dried up pretty quickly, I think thats a
response in itself to my question!

Okay, heres a summary which was requested by a few people:

Other people too are interested in my questions, they dont implement QoS in any
saleable manner and wonder how it can be done and whats actually required. 

A number of people think QoS was interesting for a while but that its never
either found its true use or is dead.

There are unresolved questions from a customer point of view as to what they are
actually going to get, what difference it will make and how they can measure
their performance and the improvements from QoS.

There is a real demand for guaranteed bandwidth, however this tends to be in the
form of absolute guarantees rather than improvements above "normal" hence
ATM remaining a popular solution.

There is a requirement to differentiate voice traffic, however this is
necessarily done by the network anyway in order to offer the service, this being
the case the customer doesnt pay extra or gets to know much about how all the
fancy bits are done.

On the face of it this is all negative. Nobody has responded saying there are
genuine requirements for services to be offered to customers. Nor has anybody
responded with any descriptions of implementations.

I conclude either the people doing this are successful and keep their secret
safe or the world is yet to sell largescale QoS across IP.

Steve

On Mon, 8 Jul 2002, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:

> 
> Hi all,
>  I've been looking through the various qos/cos options available, my particular
> area was in how IP (MPLS perhaps) compares and can be a substitute for ATM.
> 
> Well, theres lots of talk and hype out there, from simple IP queuing eg cisco
> priority queuing, rsvp, diffserv, mpls traffic engineering etc
> 
> But two things are bugging me..
> 
> 1. To what extent have providers implemented QoS for their customers
> 
> 2. Hype aside, to what extent do customers actually want this (and by this I
> dont just mean that they want the latest QoS because its the 'latest thing',
> there has to be a genuine reason for them to want it). And this takes me back to
> my ATM reference where there is a clear major market still out there of ATM
> users and what would it take to migrate them to an IP solution?
> 
> Also, how are people implementing bandwidth on demand (dynamic allocation
> controlled by the customer) solutions to customers
> 
> Cheers
> 
> Steve
> 
> 