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/