Peter Ford wrote:

My understanding is that RSVP is targeted to solve the problem of offering services such as audio/video conferencing, audio/video streaming such as radio/television, and telephony services on the Internet and private networks that use IP.

Resource reservation is nothing more than a prioritization scheme. If there's no sufficient resources to share, doling it differently does not change the fact that resources are not available. All you get by doing resource reservation is to trade packet loss to denial of service. If you think about it, a properly designed voice protocol would sustain 30% packet loss w/o much trouble (say, if you split sample bit stream into nibbles and send bit 0 in a high-priority packet, and bits 1-3 in regular-priority packets); whereas a voice network which is not available 30% of time is very close to useless.

A "problem to start with" is offering these services in the current Internet does not yet work.

Knowing for sure how Internet backbones are provisioned i can say that the solution is in entirely different plane. In fact, if you allocate resources to Internet within the same overcommitment margins as are commonly found in POTS you'll get _better_ quality of service. Without prioritization, that's it. --vadim