Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid, Prioritized Traffic?
jcdill.lists at gmail.com
Fri Sep 17 14:18:50 CDT 2010
Jack Bates wrote:
> Is consumer grade bandwidth not deprioritised to business grade
No. Today a provider doesn't move packets *within their network* faster
or slower based on if the recipient is a consumer or business customer.
Today, all providers move all packets as fast as they can be moved on
the links each customer has contracted for service on. (If you know of
an exception to this practice, today, I'd love to see cites.)
The usual congestion point is the end-user customer's line, and the
customer can only receive packets as fast as their line allows but all
packets are allowed over the customer's line with equal priority. There
may also be congestion on backbone ingress lines, but again all packets
are allowed over each of those lines with equal priority. Rarely, there
is congestion within the network - not by design but (usually) due to
equipment failure. Even then, all traffic is (usually) allowed thru
with equal priority. I don't know of any networks that intentionally
design their networks with interior systems that prioritize traffic thru
their network. It doesn't pay. In the long run it's cheaper and easier
to simply upgrade capacity than to figure out some way to delay some
packets while letting others thru.
Prioritization necessarily involves moving some traffic slower (because
you can't move traffic faster) than some link (within the provider's
network) allows, to allow "priority" traffic to more fully utilize the
link while the other (non-priority) traffic is slowed. It effectively
creates congestion points within the provider's network, if none existed
prior to implementing the prioritization scheme. "I encourage all my
competitors to do that."
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