North American Network Operators Group
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Re: best effort has economic problems

  • From: Gordon Cook
  • Date: Sat May 29 16:56:00 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: [email protected]

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