North American Network Operators Group
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Re: QoS for ADSL customers

  • From: Frank Coluccio
  • Date: Tue Nov 29 15:42:33 2005

Sean, I think your post highlights a major, yet very seldom discussed, distortion of some of the more recent issues that surface when discussing neutrality. And these are widely shared in the industry, imo. IMO, you have adequately characterized the matter, as many would regard it today. But I, along with a growing number of others no longer see neutrality in the abstract. Rather, it's about choices that both end users and non-dominant competitors have -- or more to the point, don't have-- in invoking their own desires for isochronous-like performance, or whatever performance profile they wish, when they need it, and relegate best effort to other times OR, in fact, maintain only a best-effort environment, as the case may be.

Given the unpredictable nature of end-to-end over Internet resources, focus generally shifts to the part of the experience that is most predictable and controllable. And that part is the end user's access loop section to his or her ISP. Beyond that point of interconnection it has always been assumed that, within acceptable percentile ranges, transit and core resources were more than adequate to support whatever the user had to throw at it. In fact, this may have been true in the majority of cases in the past, but today, with speeds being what they are in broadband I'm sure that the tide has reversed itself for some domains of networking, or in some percentage of all cases. But let's assume that it hasn't for a moment.

As I see the problem today, the neutrality issue has more to do with whether end users themselves are empowered to add to the print sizes in their yellow page ads, when they so choose. Short of this capability, at the very least users do not want their own applications de-prioritized by vertically integrated providers of pipe.

Users are becoming more educated and skilled in the ways of networking all the time. And where they are lacking, the state of the art makes it possible through auto-config, self-healing and auto-negotiation for the end user to begin invoking their own preferences of infrastructure and traffic shaping through the use of residential gateways and home servers, for example, which capabilities would be extended even further if head end terminal gear were designed for such purposes, as well.

Increasingly, I think we'll find over time that the issue over neutrality is not only about the top-down perspective, but about the bottom having a say in the shaping of channel facilities, too.

Frank



-------------------

From: Sean Donelan <[email protected]> Sent: Tue Nov 29 12:56:

On Tue, 29 Nov 2005, Kim Onnel wrote:
> The links are now almost always fully utilized, we want to do some QoS to
> cap our ADSL downstream, to give room for the Corp. customers traffic to
> flow without pain.

While some people will cry network neutrality and think the Yellow Pages
must sell only one size listing, some people are willing to pay for
differentiated service. Trying to classify "bad" traffic can be
done using products like Sandvine. But it may be easier to classify "premium"
traffic and mark it for special handling, and then treating everything
that isn't marked as premium traffic as best effort traffic.

But expect great wailing and gnashing of teeth over setting or changing
DSCP/TOS bits or creating different queues for different traffic. Should
DSCP bits in IP headers be treated like TTL bits which are modified by
the network. Should ISPs use anti-spoofing techniques similar to prevent
the use of arbitrary IP addresses to control DSCP/TOS values in packet
headers?

Most routers already give priority to some types of traffic, such as
routing update packets.










Frank A. Coluccio
DTI Consulting Inc.
212-587-8150 Office
347-526-6788 Mobile