
Hi Benson,

Okay -- forget about banks, forget about other comparative
analogies -- let's talk about the Internet.

I think Bill Manning hit on it a couple of days ago; Bill said
something about the Internet being about best effort and QoS
should be (various) levels of 'better-than-best effort' -- and
anything less that best effort is _not_ the Internet.

I completely agree with this, and I would also add that anything
less than best effort is not a QoS frob, it is penalization, no
matter what you want to call, and is a Bad Thing (tm).

I really don't want to get into a debate on service-level
semantics (e.g. WRED, etc.) but I think most reasonable people
can understand what I'm trying to illustrate. This thread has
gone one far enough as it stands. :-)

I think that the knobs are already 'out there' for service
providers, etc. to create real 'services', but to create arbitrary
services just to protect one's walled garden, and/or to generate
revenue (while also penalizing some customers) is something that
the market will have to sort out. It always does.

Vote with your dollar$.

Cheers,

- ferg


ps. Having looked at QoS issues from the inside-out, outside-in,
and various other persepctives, I do know a thing or two about it. :-)

-- "Schliesser, Benson" <bensons@savvis.net> wrote:

Randy-

I don't think your bank analogy is very strong, but never mind that.

I agree with what you're saying in principle, that if a user/customer
buys bit delivery at a fixed rate then we should deliver it. But as ISPs
we don't sell this. As a network operator, I do sell various kinds of
point-to-point connections with fixed/guaranteed rates. But when I sell
"Internet", or L3VPN, etc., I'm selling end-to-end packet-switched
full-mesh connectivity. In this service, not all endpoints are equal and
traffic patterns are not fixed. I.e., the service is flexible. "QoS" is
about giving the customer control over what/how traffic gets
treated/dropped. It's not false advertising.

That said, if QoS controls are used to enforce the provider's
preferences and not the customers' then I might agree with the false
advertising label. If the result is to have anti-competitive effects
then I might have some harsher labels for it, too.

Cheers,
-Benson

[snip]

--
"Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson
 Engineering Architecture for the Internet
 fergdawg@netzero.net or fergdawg@sbcglobal.net
 ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/


