No doubt what you say is true, however, the typical eVLBI site is not part of the Internet2 (and also doesn't need the TCP aspects of the Scavenger service). There are certainly applications and users out there that would like to use all of the bandwidth possible, but do not need to step on other, more bit sensitive, services. Regards Marshall On Sun, 21 Nov 2004 10:04:53 -0800 (PST) Joe St Sauver <JOE@OREGON.UOREGON.EDU> wrote:

Hi,

Less-than-best effort traffic as implemented via the Internet2 Scavenger Service (see: http://qbone.internet2.edu/qbss/ ) never really took off; for example, see http://netflow.internet2.edu/weekly/20041108/#dscp which notes that Scavenger Service (DSCP=8) tagged traffic makes up less than 1% of all octets and less than 1% of all packets.

One can argue chicken-and-egg (e.g., had it been supported on the commodity Internet, it would have been more successful), but I think the bottom line reality was that because

-- Internet2 was/is uncongested, and because -- the typical university user of I2 pays $0/Mbps used anyhow,

the motivation for users to tag traffic as Scavenger was typically non-existent (offering a "discount" from a price of zero is hard unless the model would involve PAYING people who generate less-than-best-effort traffic, a model which strikes me as, well, somewhat unsustainable/politically difficult).

A network administrator at a site might unilaterally tag all traffic of a particular type as less-than-best-effort, but again, unless there is congestion, that tagging would be to no effect.

Regards,

Joe St Sauver (joe@oregon.uoregon.edu) University of Oregon Computing Center