On Dec 10, 2015, at 2:32 PM, Chris Adams <cma@cmadams.net> wrote:
I could have paid more to get it faster, and some large-scale shippers have special arrangements that seem to get their packages priority. How is this different from Internet traffic?
For me the better comparison is international postal services. I can get USPS to give a package priority on their network, but once it leaves that SLA is gone. They did their best to deliver it to the next-hop. The concern I have here is part marketing and part technical reality. 1) “Unlimited*” doesn’t really mean unlimited, which I’m personally understanding of, but I’ve seen others take the hard-line approach. 2) “Peering” is a term that people don’t quite grok, because it’s overloaded in so many ways with transit, SFI, etc. 3) Networks are rarely equal. T-Mobile has lots of end-users. Their pattern will look different from someone doing disaster recovery off-site data storage. 4) corollary with #3 - Through M&A, divestiture and other moves companies don’t always participate in the same markets in the same way. $dayjob does not do DOCSIS/DSL services in north america. Should we? Not all networks are on the same 5 continents/countries/cities. What is that overlap necessary? The days of being at AADS, MAE-E,W, pac bell, etc have changed significantly. Content distribution has advanced, edge speeds have changed making applications feasible that were not thought possible 10-20 years ago. With the recent 174 <-> 3320 lawsuit, FCC, etc.. this all is interesting to me. How do you reach a solution where the customers win? I’ve seen many approaches to this, and as an engineer I don’t like congested ports. Congested ports mean someone is unhappy, and minimizing that is a goal. When two sides are not speaking to each other, it’s less likely things will be fixed. This is at least people working towards a solution, it may not be one where I have the old Qwest promise of every movie from everything ever *prepares to ride the light*, but I expect things to get better over time as companies adapt. - Jared P.S. Regarding “unlimited” above, things like the new overage charges for DOCSIS, DSL, FTTx services that were perceived as all you can eat, seeing a company place a ceiling on the overages seen would be ideal. eg: you max out at the business class service price, say $50 for residential $100 business class starting tiers that most companies have. Having no max for that is unreasonable for all parties as a bill for $infinity is less likely to be paid compared to 2-3x usual fees. The same theory could be applied to international data fees, just auto-sign me up for the roaming plan that matches my usage. I seem to recall Sprint had a cellular offering like this for minutes used (many eons ago) and for being shareholder and consumer friendly it seemed to be the right balance.