QoS/CoS in the real world?

Mon Jul 15 07:07:48 UTC 2002

> 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.

Having worked for a pretty large, now bankrupt, Netherlands based operator 
- where we where looking at QoS what we concluded was that

a) QoS mechanisms are for the local-tail. Backbones should have "enough" 
bandwidth (and bandwidth is cheap).

b) QoS was for customers with services like VoIP and VPN - and in most 
cases they where needed becuase the end users refused to buy the bandwidth 
they actually needed.

c) The QoS implementations in the vendor boxes at best leaves a lot to 
whish for and in most cases simply does not work (but to their credit they 
where really helpful in working with us on this).

- kurtis -

PS. Notice that I left out the M... word. :)