North American Network Operators Group

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Re: Two Tiered Internet

  • From: Sean Donelan
  • Date: Tue Dec 13 15:27:57 2005

On Tue, 13 Dec 2005, Blaine Christian wrote:
> http://www.boston.com/business/technology/articles/2005/12/13/
> telecoms_want_their_products_to_travel_on_a_faster_internet/
>
> My commentary is reserved at this point...  but, it does make me
> shudder.

Comcast has been advertising in press releases it gives priority to its
voice traffic over its network for a while.

http://www.prnewswire.com/cgi-bin/stories.pl?ACCT=104&STORY=/www/story/12-12-2005/0004231957&EDATE=

  Unlike traditional Voice over Internet Protocol (VoIP) offerings that
  run on the public Internet, Comcast Digital Voice calls originate and
  travel over Comcast's advanced, proprietary managed network.  Because
  Comcast Digital Voice is a managed service, Comcast can make sure that
  customer calls get priority handling.

If you install a Vonage terminal adapter/router, Vonage gives priority to
its voice packets over other traffic over a broadband connection.

When the various services were separate, there wasn't an issue.  DSL data
and voice service use different frequencies over the same copper pair.
Which meant DSL data bandwidth was limited because the voice frequencies
were always reserved for the voice channel.

Now that the networks are converging, how do you provide traditional
levels of reliability to the different services sharing the same network?
Do you want the picture on the TV to stop because you download a big file
on your PC?  Do you want to be able to make phone calls when your PC is
infected with Blaster and consuming your Internet bandwidth?

You coaxial cable can support a Gigabit or more of bandwidth, but the
cable company only sells you a few Megabits for Internet traffic.  The
cable company keeps the rest of the bandwidth for other services it sells
such as video and voice.  The service providers will probably sell you
a few Megabits of Internet bandwidth on your Coax/FTTH/DSL line, and use
the rest of the bandwidth on the line for other services like video or
voice.  They may sell the use of the "extra" bandwidth above the level
you bought for Internet service to other companies.  You may have only
bought 5 Mbps service from your cable company, but the cable company may
sell a burstable service to a Video On Demand company which lets them
download movies at 30 Mbps above your normal bandwidth cap.  However,
the VOD company may have only scavenger class bandwidth, which means if
you are using the cable bandwidth for something else the VOD download
won't interfere with it.

Does Google treat ICMP packets equally as web packets?