best effort has economic problems

Sat May 29 20:53:17 UTC 2004

may  I make just a passing observation?

 From a technology  point of view the best effort internet certainly 
"works."  Not surprisingly the comments here are primarily debating 
the finer points of the technology.

The point I am making in my report is NOT that the best effort 
network has technology problems but rather that it has ECONOMIC 
PROBLEMS.  That it might support 2 or 3 players not 2 or 3 HUNDRED. 
That until companies begin to go chapter seven and vanish, the best 
effort net will be a black hole that burns up capital because, for 
many players, the OPERATIONAL expense is more than they get for 
bandwidth never mind cap-ex.

best effort won't go away.  many best effort players will.

for the time being, best effort bandwidth prices as an absolute 
commodity cannot sustain networks over the long haul.  A network that 
can deliver QoS the report hypothesizes may be able to attract enough 
revenue to become profitable.  How to to this my group is still 
discussing.  We don't pretend that QoS is easy or any kind of mature 
collection of technologies, but increasingly it looks as though the 
industry, if it is ever going to be self sustaining, really needs to 
look at QoS services and solutions.

>On Sat, 29 May 2004, Edward B. Dreger wrote:
>
>>  Nitpicking:  Latency isn't that important with unidirectional
>>  communication.  However, VoIP users seem reasonably happy with
>>  current latency and jitter -- and the Internet still is _largely_
>>  xxTP, anyway... particularly if one ignores peer-to-peer file-
>>  swapping programs.
>
>Latency is fine for VOIP as long as you dont interact with the PSTN
>network, if you want to interact with PSTN then you need echo
>cancellation if you have high latency on the IP part.
>
>Most VOIP applications can handle 40ms jitter, so that's normally no
>problem unless your local access is full. Packet loss is normally no
>problem for VOIP if you use a proper (non-telco developed) codec.
>
>VOIP is actually better off with high packet loss and low jitter than the
>other way around (throwing off the old truth that core equipment should
>have lots of buffers).
>
>--
>Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se

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