The Qos PipeDream [Was: RE: Two Tiered Internet]

Thu Dec 15 04:25:48 UTC 2005

Hey there Fergie:

> Martin,
> 
> You can 'see' anything you'd like, buy your reality
> does not match everyone else's -- my opinion, of course.
> 
> QoS is a myth -- it doesn't exist.
> 
> What you're obviosuly trying to tell us is that less-than-best-
> effort is somehow good? Never sell it.
> 
> This vein will come back and bite you guys who think like this.
>

I'm not sggesting that this be the way the Internet operate at all.
The poster asked how this would work if it did (my interpretation) and
where there is will (customers) and money (ISP's) there is always a way.
The old school in me says "never!", but the experience in me says "possible".
I think it *is* unlikely though. 

Consider the busy signal approach for a second though. Can we build, pay 
for, and sustain an Internet that never has congestion or is never "busy". If you
have a web server and a limited amount of memory or net you tune down the number of
httpd's that are spawned and when they are all busy, your site doesn't 
answer and you get a 404. That's akin to a busy signal and is already
in practice today. If I'm Google, for example, I buy thousands of servers
so this does not happen. If I'm just plain old me and I am running some
popular faq on my personal site, I accept the 404's because I am not
going to pay for 100% performance. They can try again later, or, I 
can pay for more memory or more network to insure optimal performance.

Hope that makes a little more sense. And let me turn the question
around to you. If the Internet were to work like this, how would
we do it?

> - ferg
> 
> 
> -- "Hannigan, Martin" <hannigan at verisign.com> wrote:
> 
>  
> > What I'm interested in is how the two service
> > providers will build a two tiered Internet. 
> 
> The PSTN is tiered both in architecture and operation.
> Switching hiearchies and a seperate SS7 network which
> is basically a billing network.
> 
> I think the thought is service levels vs. congestion control.
> For example, CO's have call overflow mechanisms to tandem switch
> points which basically seek out excess capacity and use it as
> overflow for call termination if and when possible. 
> 
> I could see an internet hiearchy where preferred traffic was
> switch onto hicap overflow links with controlled congestion and
> other traffic, non premium traffic, "got a fast busy".
> 
> -M<
> 
> --
> "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
>  Engineering Architecture for the Internet
>  fergdawg at netzero.net or fergdawg at sbcglobal.net
>  ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/
> 
> 
> 