On Wed, 14 Dec 2005 10:54:43 +0000, Michael.Dillon@btradianz.com said:
But there is another way. If you provide enough bandwidth so that your peak traffic levels can travel through the network without ever being buffered at any of the core network interfaces, then everybody is a king. If you charge your customers a higher fee for such a network than your competitors do, then we have a tiered Internet. This unobstructed network was pioneered by Sprint on it's zero-CIR frame relay network and they carried this forward into their IP network as well. Other companies have carried forward this architecture as well.
That's the way all serious providers did IP-backbone engineering when there was no QoS. Local congestion in the access-network would happen from time to time even back in the 90s, but a network with congestion-problems in the backbone would soon be a network with no customers. Even today, it's the superior principle for backbone engineering. Most QoS-handling (and other traffic-engineering) gizmos, although some look good on paper, are too complex and too labour-intensive to offer cost-saving or other operational advantage in large IP backbones. Bandwith in the form of long-haul dark-fiber or colors would have to be much more expensive to change that equation. //per -- Per Heldal heldal@eml.cc