You know, I sent an idiotic response to a serious topic, and I shouldn't have -- it is a serious issue which deserves a serious response. Anyone within earshot of The Great State of Texas (tm) should know that the sickening machinations of the incumbent teclo(s) and Cable Co.(s), and their trance-dance lobbying with Texas state legislature in the past year would leave a really, really bad taste in anyone's mouth. Now, before you turn a deaf ear to this, realize that Texas is very much asn incubator for every state in the union, and their PUC's, legislatures, etc., when it comes to overcoming existing obstacles in the incumbent telecommunications marketplace. What we're talking about here has NOTHING to do with technology, but EVERYTHING to do with protecting a revenue stream in the face of dispruptive technolog(y)(ies) that threaten the incumbents. So stop acting like it's a matter of actually introducing REAL methods of traffic metering, QoS, or other REAL technical methods to offer better-than-best effort. What these guys are talking about is penalization. Don't pretend otherwise. To do so is truly disingenious. Also, it's been kind of fun to watch all of the QoS experts come out of the woodwork on this thread to offer their technical genius on how to solve the proverbial problem. Please. This is not directed at Sean, but please -- as a fomer Cisco engineering flunky, I can distinguish between marketing fluff (even when disguised as a 'case study') and real figures, and the truth is, there are no figures, because there is dismal adoption of the services. Go figure. Whatever. In a previous life I also worked for Sprint, so I know what its like for a service provider's marketing department trying to create revenue streams -- they try toi shove stuff down everyone's throat. Some good technology, mostly bad. In any event, this whole 'distinguished service offering' is nothing more than a ruse. - ferg -- "Fergie" <fergdawg@netzero.net> wrote: Marketing. Bah. - ferg -- Sean Donelan <sean@donelan.com> wrote: On Wed, 14 Dec 2005, Tony Li wrote:

I believe it when it gets to my street. So far, the reality is Really Slow DSL, with service and installation times measured in weeks at costs that aren't competitive. So yes, I missed all of that.

There are currently a couple of million IPTV users worldwide. Imagine how much more useful the conversation would be if it included people who have actually used it and could say what their experience has been instead of people leaping to conlusions based on inaccurate reports. http://www.cisco.com/application/pdf/en/us/guest/netsol/ns610/c647/cdccont_0... -- "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/