Here’s a longish rant on QoS which is making the rounds this morning. The author’s contention is that QoS is nothing more than a disguised billing model for incumbents. I am not sure I entirely agree, but I certainly do agree that there are simpler solutions than the ones being proposed. The case for QoS isn’t that the network operators network doesn’t have bandwidth, but rather that the last mile is so poor. Prioritizing traffic on the routers we all use would solve that problem.Â
Alec Saunders is the Vice President of Developer Relations for BlackBerry maker Research in Motion. This is his personal blog, with his personal viewpoints. Prior to this Alec was the CEO and co-founder of Calliflower — the easiest way to hold a meeting, online, on a conference call, or on the go. A double-decade veteran of product management and marketing, he spent nine years at Microsoft where he helped launch Windows 95, the first two versions of Internet Explorer, the Universal Plug and Play initiative, the push into home markets, opt-in email marketing and what might well go down in history as the very first direct email list ever.
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Its been interesting to watch the progression of QoS implementations over the last 15 years. The bottom line is that you just need to identify the high priority traffic somehow and handle is more quickly than other traffic. Diffserv works for this but nobody does it and when they do, there's no agreement on the actual painting of packets. The only thing that has worked has been some kind of "segregation" of traffic in an arbitrary way. This means separate timeslots in a T-1 or PVC or SVC in an ATM network, essentially, reserved bandwidth.
The real problem is, if we can't get devices (and their users) to be "curteous" about sharing their bandwidth, you're really left with traffic segregation as the only means to really make sure it works. As soon as you start talking about segregation, you've introduced overhead and overhead needs to be paid for. I guess my point is, I don't see this as some kind of conspiracy. The telcos may be capitalizing on the problem, but the underlying problem is real and the solution they're using is really the best way to solve the problem. Unfortunate, not a conspiracy.
It's funny Frank, but the QoS I've used really successfully at home has been pretty brute force. My Linksys WRT54GS router has the ability to prioritize traffic from individual MAC addresses high. I simply told it that the ATA devices got priority over everything else. Boom! Great quality… it's not courteous, but it works.
I'm not sure whether painting packets, or whatever else, is the right way to do this. But I don't think it's hard if the parties with vested interests can get to the table. Or, as the article points out, maybe that isn't their intent.