Hmm. Let me one more word. Very short. And I promise to be quiet anymore. When I order bandwidth, I got BANDWIDTH. Just what I asked. When I install RSVP and QoS software tricks, what will I have? Nothing predictable - it can work, it can not work, it can work for months and then destroy itself. The density of bugs increase every months (true for CISCO, true for MS, I think it's true for other vendors). Result? How can sales people use something mistical? They prefer to get solid and simple way - order bandwidth. On Tue, 18 May 1999, Steve Riley (MCS) wrote:
Date: Tue, 18 May 1999 13:02:28 -0700 From: Steve Riley (MCS) <steriley@microsoft.com> To: nanog@merit.edu Subject: RE: Is anyone actually USING IP QoS?
Hmm. It was interesting to read the various replies both on the list and personal. A number of people pointed out, rightly, that I'm thinking of the USA. That's true. They further gave examples of the exhorbitant costs that people elsewhere in the world pay for connections. While I certainly understand the desire to use some form of QoS to squeeze every bit of capacity from expensive skinny pipes, I believe that it is wrong to try to use a technological solution (usually poorly understood and implemented) to solve what is primarily a political problem. There is absolutely no technological reason why international rates are so much higher than domestic US rates.
Regarding the idea of "free bandwidth," that's not what I said. I said that bandwidth is "essentially free." Of course there will always be a cost for bandwidth. But consider for a moment what's happened to disk storage. In 1990 I purchased my first PC. I paid $550 for an 80 MB hard drive -- that's $6.875 per megabyte. Today you can purchase a 25 GB hard drive for $450 -- that's $0.018 per megabyte. That's a 31,250% increase in capacity accompanied by a 99.73% reduction in price per megabyte. So you see, on a per megabyte basis, storage is "essentially free." The same thing has happened to CPU and memory. It will happen to bandwidth, too, and in many cases already has.
For a time I worked in information technology architecture. One of the tennents of that field is that it's always cheaper to trade capacity for staff. You can overbuild now, while planning for growth, and save money over the alternative of continually tweaking and making minor improvements and upgrades which requires expensive time and personnel. QoS is an acceptable idea which in certain specific situations might be suitable for solving an existing problem. But since QoS is expensive to manage it simply is not viable in the long term. We in the networking and telecommunications industries need to redirect our energy away from bandages and instead toward making abundant bandwidth readily available to everyone.
_________________________________________________________ Steve Riley Microsoft Telecommunications Practice in Denver, Colorado email: mailto:steriley@microsoft.com call: +1 303 521-4129 (cellular) page: +1 888 440-6249 or mailto:4406249@skytel.com Applying computer technology is simply finding the right wrench to pound in the correct screw.
-----Original Message----- From: Vadim Antonov [mailto:avg@kotovnik.com] Sent: Monday, May 17, 1999 4:29 PM To: nanog@merit.edu; Steve Riley (MCS) Subject: RE: Is anyone actually USING IP QoS?
Steve Riley (MCS) <steriley@microsoft.com> wrote:
Nice to see that I'm not the only one believing in the foolishness of QoS hype.
Er... me, agreeing with someone from Microsoft? Yeech! (just kidding :)
Allow me to point you to an interesting paper called "Rise of the Stupid Network."
Unfortunately that paper oversimplifies the whole congestion control issue by completely ignoring the fact that data traffic has a heavy-tailed distribution. Which pretty much means that no matter how much capacity is there, as long as there's oversubscription there will be at least transient traffic jams.
Which means that the issue of what to do with different types of traffic when there's a congestion cannot be just pooh-poohed.
The big problem with G.711 and its progeny is the lack of effective cooperative congestion control which would guarantee network stability (like TCP does). Fortunately, the bulk of network traffic is "canned" content, which can (and should) be transmitted with TCP.
--vadim
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