On Fri, 16 Dec 2005, Christopher L. Morrow wrote:
Maybe part of the discussion problem here is the overbroad use of 'QOS in the network!' ? Perhaps saying, which I think people have, that QOS
Probably. Users, executives and reporters are rarely careful talking about the technical details. They are usually more interested solving a problem. Engineers sometimes get caught up in arguing about the pro's and con's of a particular widget and sometimes miss other ways to solve the real problem. Suppose you wanted your web content to load faster on a user's computer, how would you do it? Could you hire a content distribution network like Akamia to improve the quality of service for your content? Is the Internet a zero-sum game, so if Akamia makes one web site faster does that mean all other web sites must get slower? Instead of paying a CDN, what if an ISP told content providers you could host your content on our server farms close to the end-user connections. If the content provider doesn't pay the ISP to host the content on their network, the content is delivered over the Internet from wherever in the world the content provider data center is located. There are lots of ways to improve the quality of service for some content versus other content. Should ISPs be prohibited from giving a CDN operator space or bandwidth for its servers because they don't have space for every CDN that wants space? Should ISPs be prohibited from operating their own CDN? Doesn't a CDN create an unlevel playing field between content providers that pay to use it over content providers that don't pay for the CDN? If you want to define QoS as a strawman, you can. But it doesn't solve the problem.