Observations of an Internet Middleman (Level3)

Thu May 15 17:48:10 UTC 2014

Its not really that complex, if you think about it having 10000s of
'movieco' with the same priority is the status quo.  At the end of the day
the QoS mechanics in DOCSIS are pretty straightforward and rely on service
flows, while service flows can have equal priority I doubt most operators
will sell more than a few (perhaps just one) top priority in a given a
category.

Scott Helms
Vice President of Technology
ZCorum
(678) 507-5000
--------------------------------
http://twitter.com/kscotthelms
--------------------------------

On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 1:22 PM, Christopher Morrow <morrowc.lists at gmail.com
> wrote:

> On Thu, May 15, 2014 at 1:06 PM, Ryan Brooks <ryan at hack.net> wrote:
> > On 5/15/14, 11:58 AM, Joe Greco wrote:
> >>
> >> 2) Netflix purchases 5Mbps "fast lane"
> >>
> >
> > I appreciate Joe's use of quotation marks here.    A lot of the dialog
> has
> > included this 'fast lane' terminology, yet all of us know there's no
> 'fast
> > lane' being constructed, rather just varying degrees of _slow_ applied to
> > existing traffic.
> >
>
> please correct me if I'm wrong, but 'fast lane' really is (in this
> example):
>   'cableco' port from 'moviecompany' has 'qos' marking configuration
> to set all 'moviecompany' traffic (from this port!) to some priority
> level.
>
>   customer-port to 'cableco' has 'qos' handling/queuing that will
> ensure '5mbps' of 'moviecompany' is always going to get down the link
> to the customer, regardless of the other traffic the customer is
> requesting.
>
> right? (presume that in the rest of the 'cableco' network is
> protecting 'moviecompany' traffic as well, of course)
>
> So, when there are 1 'moviecompany' things to prioritize and deliver
> that's cool... but what about when there are 10? 100? 1000? doesn't
> the queuing get complicated? what if the 'cableco' customer with
> 10mbps link has 3 people in the location all streaming from 3
> different 'moviecompany' organizations which have paid for 'fastlane'
> services?
>
> 3 x 5 == 15 ... not 10. How will 'cableco' manage this when their
> 100gbps inter-metro links are seeing +100gbps if 'fastlane' traffic
> and 'fastlane' traffic can't make it to the local metro from the
> remote one?
>
> This all seems much, much more complicated and expensive than just
> building out networking, which they will have to do in the end anyway,
> right? Only with 'fastlanes' there's extra capacity management and
> configuration and testing and ... all on top of: "Gosh, does the new
> umnptyfart card from routerco actually work in old routerco routers?"
>
> This looks, to me, like nuttiness... like mutually assured destruction
> that the cableco folk are driving both parties into intentionally.
>
> -chris
>
> BTW: I didn't use a particular 'cable company' name for 'cableco', nor
> did I use a particular streaming media company for 'moviecompany'...
> Also, 'cableco' is short-hand for
> 'lastmile-consumer-provider-network'. Less typing was better, for me,
> I thought.
>