Doubts About Quality of Service Over IP
The Internet2 project found, in 2001, that the QoS protocols were probably not deployable inside its Abilene Network with equipment available at that time. Equipment available at the time relied on software to implement QoS. The group also predicted that “logistical, financial, and organizational barriers will block the way toward any bandwidth guarantees” by protocol modifications aimed at QoS. They believed that the economics would encourage network providers to deliberately erode the quality of best effort traffic as a way to push customers to higher priced QoS services. Instead they proposed over-provisioning of capacity as more cost-effective at the time.
The Abilene network study was the basis for the testimony of Gary Bachula to the US Senate Commerce Committee's hearing on Network Neutrality in early 2006. He expressed the opinion that adding more bandwidth was more effective than any of the various schemes for accomplishing QoS they examined.
Bachula's testimony has been cited by proponents of a law banning quality of service as proof that no legitimate purpose is served by such an offering. This argument is dependent on the assumption that over-provisioning isn't a form of QoS and that it is always possible. Cost and other factors affect the ability of carriers to build and maintain permanently over-provisioned networks
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Famous quotes containing the words doubts, quality and/or service:
“The more knowledge, the clearer what the doubts are.”
—Mason Cooley (b. 1927)
“There is a quality even meaner than outright ugliness or disorder, and this meaner quality is the dishonest mask of pretended order, achieved by ignoring or suppressing the real order that is struggling to exist and to be served.”
—Jane Jacobs (b. 1916)
“We too are ashes as we watch and hear
The psalm, the sorrow, and the simple praise
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Were such as ours, but now wholly destroyed,
The service record of his youth wiped out,
His dream dispersed by shot, must disappear.”
—Karl Shapiro (b. 1913)