Hey there Fergie:
Martin,
You can 'see' anything you'd like, buy your reality does not match everyone else's -- my opinion, of course.
QoS is a myth -- it doesn't exist.
What you're obviosuly trying to tell us is that less-than-best- effort is somehow good? Never sell it.
This vein will come back and bite you guys who think like this.
I'm not sggesting that this be the way the Internet operate at all. The poster asked how this would work if it did (my interpretation) and where there is will (customers) and money (ISP's) there is always a way. The old school in me says "never!", but the experience in me says "possible". I think it *is* unlikely though. Consider the busy signal approach for a second though. Can we build, pay for, and sustain an Internet that never has congestion or is never "busy". If you have a web server and a limited amount of memory or net you tune down the number of httpd's that are spawned and when they are all busy, your site doesn't answer and you get a 404. That's akin to a busy signal and is already in practice today. If I'm Google, for example, I buy thousands of servers so this does not happen. If I'm just plain old me and I am running some popular faq on my personal site, I accept the 404's because I am not going to pay for 100% performance. They can try again later, or, I can pay for more memory or more network to insure optimal performance. Hope that makes a little more sense. And let me turn the question around to you. If the Internet were to work like this, how would we do it?
- ferg
-- "Hannigan, Martin" <hannigan@verisign.com> wrote:
What I'm interested in is how the two service providers will build a two tiered Internet.
The PSTN is tiered both in architecture and operation. Switching hiearchies and a seperate SS7 network which is basically a billing network.
I think the thought is service levels vs. congestion control. For example, CO's have call overflow mechanisms to tandem switch points which basically seek out excess capacity and use it as overflow for call termination if and when possible.
I could see an internet hiearchy where preferred traffic was switch onto hicap overflow links with controlled congestion and other traffic, non premium traffic, "got a fast busy".
-M<
-- "Fergie", a.k.a. Paul Ferguson Engineering Architecture for the Internet fergdawg@netzero.net or fergdawg@sbcglobal.net ferg's tech blog: http://fergdawg.blogspot.com/