Re: Is anyone actually USING IP QoS?

[Nick Bastin <nbastin () rbbsystems com>]

"Steve Riley (MCS)" wrote:
> Regarding the idea of "free bandwidth," that's not what I said. I said that
> bandwidth is "essentially free." Of course there will always be a cost for
> bandwidth. But consider for a moment what's happened to disk storage. In
> 1990 I purchased my first PC. I paid $550 for an 80 MB hard drive -- that's
> $6.875 per megabyte. Today you can purchase a 25 GB hard drive for $450 --
> that's $0.018 per megabyte. That's a 31,250% increase in capacity
> accompanied by a 99.73% reduction in price per megabyte. So you see, on a
> per megabyte basis, storage is "essentially free." The same thing has
> happened to CPU and memory. It will happen to bandwidth, too, and in many
> cases already has.

I'll concede this point.  However, it's worth pointing out that
megabytes of disk space can actually be 'had', while bandwidth doesn't
really exist.  Most of us, at least, have to pay for bandwidth by the
month, while we only pay for the same piece of storage space once (and
then we actually posess it).  This is important because it impacts how
far this cost model can be extended, and for how long.

-- 
Nick Bastin - RBB Systems, Inc.
The idea that Bill Gates has appeared like a knight in shining armour to
lead all customers out of a mire of technological chaos neatly ignores
the fact that it was he who, by peddling second-rate technology, led
them into it in the first place. - Douglas Adams