[ NNSquad ] Re: Additional or differentiated services

[Richard Bennett <richard@bennett.com>]

 The performance of the best efforts Internet changes, but I'm not sure 
how constant the change is; it seems to me that it's sort of step 
function where long periods of stagnation are interrupted by sudden 
upgrades to major facilities.

Ten years ago, the Internet by and large didn't support VoIP, that's a 
fact. But upgrades to make it support graphics-rich web pages had the 
side effect of freeing up enough regular capacity for VoIP to run pretty 
well, most of the time, on the Internet in North America, East Asia, and 
Western Europe; it's still challenging in the Third World.

I don't doubt that the time will come when immersive VC as we know it 
today will work well on much of the Internet as well, but that will take 
major upgrades all the way from the last mile to the core switches, and 
even then will probably work better with VLAN tags, MPLS traffic 
classes, and/or DiffServ and/or IntServ. The point is that the Internet 
doesn't support this application today, and many people want to use it 
so they rely in SLAs, managed conference server nets, private wire, and 
virtual private wire.

On 8/27/2010 1:45 PM, Larry Press wrote:
> On 8/27/2010 10:44 AM, George Ou wrote:
>
> > Telepresence is certainly one example of bypassing the best-effort 
> Internet.
>
> Whether or not the best-effort Internet is capable of "telepresence" 
> depends upon the speed and resolution your application requires.
>
> Also, the performance of the best-effort Internet and QOS-based 
> Internet change constantly.  You would probably have said the 
> best-effort Internet could not support VoIP ten years ago.
>
>
> > Paying $45 for a low quality 1.2 Mbps PPV even only to
> > have it pause in the middle of a crucial moment sucks.
>
> Paying $45 for a bunch of crappy channels that you never watch in 
> order to see a few programs that you want to watch each week sucks too.
>
> Larry Press

--
Richard Bennett
Senior Research Fellow
Information Technology and Innovation Foundation
Washington, DC