On Sun, 24 Jun 2007, Robert Blayzor wrote:
However, if you put 15G down your "20G" path, you have no redundancy. In a cut, dropping 5G on the floor, causing 33% packet loss is not "up", it might as well be down.
I don't know if that's always true. Case in point 802.17. It runs active-active in unprotected space. While you have the extra bandwidth and classes of service, a cut doesn't really mean you're hard down, it all depends on the SLA's you provide to customers. Of course anything over the guaranteed bandwidth during failure would be classed only as "best effort".
Then there's the interesting: "How do you classify 'to be dropped' traffic?" Simon suggests nntp or BitTorrent could be put into a lower class queue, I'm curious as to how you'd classify traffic which is port-agile such as BitTorrent though. In theory that sounds like a grand plan, in practice it isn't simple...