Re: QoS/CoS interest

[bill.st.arnaud () canarie ca]

Scott:

In general I agree with you.  I was careful to say that there will be lots of 
national backbone bandwidth e.g. Qwest's new OC192 network, MCI and AT&T 
upgrades etc. There still exists major problems with bandwidth in an around 
major metropolitan areas like Chicago and NY that are not likely to be 
resolved soon.  And as you have pointed out the regulators are always a wild 
card in terms of available bandwidth and pricing.

In Canada, we have been very fortunate in having excess fibre capacity in and 
around our major metropolitan areas, with more coming on line every day. The 
problem has become so acute, that in Toronto we probably have the lowest ATM 
circuit prices anywhere in North America.  In Montreal the local university 
GigaPOP consortium is pulling their own 40 strand fibre through the city 
ducts at a cost less than one year's tariff that the carrier wanted for a DS3 
connection between these same institutions.

The question in my mind is how long will it take to get QoS/CoS working 
effectively over heterogenous networks with all the related business issues 
of settlements, etc versus how long it will take for the facilities providers 
to plow new fibre into the ground?

If the fibre shortage is resolved quickly and all these promised WDM and 
optical technologies come to pass than the QoS/CoS business issues may prove 
to be an interesting technical challenge but never get wide commercial 
deployment.

Bill



--- On Thu, 22 May 1997 09:30:03 -0400 (EDT)  Scott Bradner 
<sob () newdev harvard edu> wrote:
> Bill,
>
> --
> However, I always alike to be a bit contrarian and point out that QoS or
> Multicast may never be needed because of the explosive growth of fiber
> bandwidth.  I believe, in the future, it will be a lot easier and cheaper 
to
> deploy bandwidth rather than manage complex router/switch technology to
> support QoS/CoS.
> --
>
> I think this is a myth, at least for now - the production of fiber in the
> world was 1.25 million fiber miles short of demand last year and is 
> expeced to be about the same this year.  IN addition rights of way are
> getting rather hard to obtain.  WDM will be a great help but it does
> not cause fiber to be run into Seattle.
>
> The cost of putting down fiber is still very high (particularally across
> the ponds) and even with WDM the cost of bandwidth will continue
> to be high.  Yes the cost should drop (assuming that it is not 
> kept high by other things like telco or government policies) but
> we ain't going to see "bandwidth too cheap to measure" (as someone
> put it on comm-priv 2 years ago) in any timeframe that will let the
> Internet community avoid looking at QoS as a very real issue.
>
> Scott
> .

---------------End of Original Message-----------------

-------------------------------------
Bill St. Arnaud           CANARIE Inc
Director Network Projects 470-410 Laurier Ave W
Tel: +1 613 660-3497      Ottawa          
     199.212.24.5         Canada  
FAX: +1 613 660-3806      K1P 6H5            
bill.st.arnaud () canarie ca  http://www.canarie.ca/bstarn  


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