I've been involved in service provider networks, small retail ISPs, for 20+ years now. Largely though, we've never needed complex QoS, as at $OLD_DAY_JOB, we had been consistently positioned to avoid regular link congestion by having sufficient capacity. In the few instances when we've had link congestion, egress priority queuing met our needs. With a new organization there is a set of circumstances that have resulted in a long standing business decision to apply some rate-limiting/traffic management during times of higher utilization to a subset of traffic. This traffic happens to be ABR streaming video traffic. The thought was that a little bit of packet loss that comes from RED or WRED could largely be absorbed in the ABR playback client's innate behavior, and yes, possibly a drop in video profile. These are acceptable business outcomes in this case. The question I have for the smart people of this list is, given the specific application that is receiving this treatment, is there any reason to apply a RED behavior any appreciable amount before the bandwidth limit for this application? It makes sense to me for interactive TCP traffic where you want to apply some artificial control to the TCP window, but I *feel* like ABR streaming video was designed to expect congestion, at least as the edge of the customers home, and combine that with the buffering and we should adjust the drop profile to kick in at a higher percentage. Today we use 70% to start triggering the drop behavior, but my head tells me it should be higher. The reason I am saying this is that we are dropping packets ahead of full link congestion, yes that is what RED was designed to do, but I surmise that we are making this application worse than is actually intended.