Scott: In general I agree with you. I was careful to say that there will be lots of national backbone bandwidth e.g. Qwest's new OC192 network, MCI and AT&T upgrades etc. There still exists major problems with bandwidth in an around major metropolitan areas like Chicago and NY that are not likely to be resolved soon. And as you have pointed out the regulators are always a wild card in terms of available bandwidth and pricing. In Canada, we have been very fortunate in having excess fibre capacity in and around our major metropolitan areas, with more coming on line every day. The problem has become so acute, that in Toronto we probably have the lowest ATM circuit prices anywhere in North America. In Montreal the local university GigaPOP consortium is pulling their own 40 strand fibre through the city ducts at a cost less than one year's tariff that the carrier wanted for a DS3 connection between these same institutions. The question in my mind is how long will it take to get QoS/CoS working effectively over heterogenous networks with all the related business issues of settlements, etc versus how long it will take for the facilities providers to plow new fibre into the ground? If the fibre shortage is resolved quickly and all these promised WDM and optical technologies come to pass than the QoS/CoS business issues may prove to be an interesting technical challenge but never get wide commercial deployment. Bill --- On Thu, 22 May 1997 09:30:03 -0400 (EDT) Scott Bradner <sob@newdev.harvard.edu> wrote:

Bill,

-- However, I always alike to be a bit contrarian and point out that QoS or Multicast may never be needed because of the explosive growth of fiber bandwidth. I believe, in the future, it will be a lot easier and cheaper to deploy bandwidth rather than manage complex router/switch technology to support QoS/CoS. --

I think this is a myth, at least for now - the production of fiber in the world was 1.25 million fiber miles short of demand last year and is expeced to be about the same this year. IN addition rights of way are getting rather hard to obtain. WDM will be a great help but it does not cause fiber to be run into Seattle.

The cost of putting down fiber is still very high (particularally across the ponds) and even with WDM the cost of bandwidth will continue to be high. Yes the cost should drop (assuming that it is not kept high by other things like telco or government policies) but we ain't going to see "bandwidth too cheap to measure" (as someone put it on comm-priv 2 years ago) in any timeframe that will let the Internet community avoid looking at QoS as a very real issue.

Scott .

---------------End of Original Message----------------- ------------------------------------- Bill St. Arnaud CANARIE Inc Director Network Projects 470-410 Laurier Ave W Tel: +1 613 660-3497 Ottawa 199.212.24.5 Canada FAX: +1 613 660-3806 K1P 6H5 bill.st.arnaud@canarie.ca http://www.canarie.ca/bstarn