Other people have touched on it, but I'd like to re-iterate: The quality that someone can expect out of their Internet connection, as a practical matter, will somewhat vary with how much they're willing to pay. It seems to me that giving someone <<1% downtime is an expensive level of service. The Internet market today is not one where most customers question the providers on the level of service; quite contrarily they question the providers on how cheap they can go. This type of market will be cost driven, and for my $19.95 unlimited PPP account, do you think my ISP will be able to give me <<1% inaccessibility? Not without operating in the red, I don't think. I think most ISP's would be *delighted* to offer customers Very High Quality service, but few customers are willing to pay for that service. As a result, the final judgement of "how good is good enough" will be "whatever the customer can live with," as compared to anything that engineers like (ie 1%, 5%, etc). Ed ed@texas.net (p.s. you notice I'm brushing aside the first question, being "how do I *measure* the quality of service." Offhand, a weighted average of all of the components that a given customer needs for a connection makes the most sense to me.) -- On Tue, 28 Nov 1995 joliveto@cwi.net wrote:
Hans;
Sorry...I waited for additional replies but you seemed to be the only one to take my bait. My question was rhetorical.
I hear all this complaining on this forum about unacceptable delay and packet loss by the ISP Community yet no "respected" industry standards body has yet set QOS guidelines for ISP's! An old management dictum says "if its important, measure it".
I know where to look for QOS criteria on my physical plant (T1/DS3's), I even know where to look for QOS criteria for my old X.25 network. If we want things to get better w/i the ISP Community...let's define what better is.
- jeff -