My guess would be that basically everybody doing triple play will prioritize the IPTV and VoIP packets in their network including the access. Considering that streaming UDP IPTV requires very very low
packet
loss, much better than Best Effort, this is needed to provide a good quality service.
This is preferential treatment for some packets and it makes perfect technological sense.
But it's no magic bullet. Streaming live media also requires low jitter, especially if you are selling it as TV because viewers will join and leave channels often, as they change channels on their remote controls. This means you can't have big local buffers to hide jitter, therefore you have to build a network with enough capacity so that packets are all cut-through switched. It's possible to hide packet loss from IPTV by throwing away some other application's packets but you can't hide jitter on your network. And if you have built such a good network that you don't have jitter, there is not going to be any packet loss either so QoS does nothing at all. Preferential treatment can degrade service, but it cannot improve service. If you prefer an IPTV service then you are degrading all other services. If a 3rd party measures the true quality of your service without using IPTV, then they will see a network with much worse performance than on a network which does not do preferential treatment. No magic bullets. And if you are spending the extra money to implement preferential treatment, can you be sure that there is a market willing to pay extra for this? --Michael Dillon