At 09:46 AM 5/22/97 -0500, bill.st.arnaud@canarie.ca wrote:

There still exists major problems with bandwidth in an around major metropolitan areas like Chicago and NY

In our attempts to secure fiber we are quite often frustrated by local availability problems. But it is not restricted to local. There are still inter-city problem areas too.

In Canada, we have been very fortunate in having excess fibre capacity in and around our major metropolitan areas, with more coming on line every day. The problem has become so acute, that in Toronto we probably have the lowest ATM circuit prices anywhere in North America.

I could *really* like Toronto :-) [if I can live in San Diego in Winter]

In Montreal the local university GigaPOP consortium is pulling their own 40 strand fibre through the city ducts at a cost less than one year's tariff that the carrier wanted for a DS3 connection between these same institutions.

The question in my mind is how long will it take to get QoS/CoS working effectively over heterogenous networks with all the related business issues of settlements, etc versus how long it will take for the facilities

In my town, a major manufacturer put in their own SONET rings. They hired the same construction companies who put it in the ground for the TELCOs and CABLE companies. providers

to plow new fibre into the ground?

Private discussions of this topic abound. We always come to these observations. My discsusions with others in research and network planning has yeilded similar concerns. I really wonder if anyone really cares about this enough to propose a preliminary service model with the corresponding business Ts & Cs. My belief is that if a wide spread agreement can be reached on the business issues, then the technology-builders will respond rapidly. In the meantime, we will continue to see differentiated quality of service only in: 1. Private network segements (Intranets) 2. L2 supported VPN with ATM QoS 3. Virtual QoS [i.e. over public networks with your fingers crossed]

If the fibre shortage is resolved quickly and all these promised WDM and optical technologies come to pass than the QoS/CoS business issues may prove to be an interesting technical challenge but never get wide commercial deployment.

Bill

I hope that Paul's collections of comments (public and private) will be summarized for this community. However, it would be interesting to see the discussion broadly published in Internet trade press with a clear statement of the issues with a WWW mechanism to reply with a yes-mabey-no statement of interest. I encourage this consumer polling because I do not assume opinions of NANOG readers are representative of opinions in the business market. ..mike.. Mike Trest EMAIL: trest@atmnet.net ATMnet VOICE: 619 643 1805 5440 Morehouse Drive #3700 FAX: 619 643 1801 San Diego, CA USA 92121 BEEP: 619 960 9070