[ih] Better-than-Best Effort

[Louis Mamakos]

On 27 Aug 2021, at 17:44, Toerless Eckert wrote:
> Counterpoints:
>
> From my experience, SPs that in the past decade migrated their own 
> analog/digital
> infrastructure to VoIP do use DiffServ to protect it and to be able to 
> provide the
> same flawless quality as they had in before. And of course, those SPs 
> will never
> offer such a DiffServ network option to any OTT voip provideer because 
> QoS is one of
> the few distinguishing aspects that an OTT can not easily clone. So 
> with this data
> point i would re-emphasize that i think business models and 
> regulations for equal
> access to nework services are a key challenge to enable use of better 
> network services.
>
> Besides: 90% of all TCP/IP use is not the Internet, but in limited 
> domain networks, and
> you will find a lot of QoS there, especially also when its being sold 
> as managed services.
> Its the fine-grained business model of Internet subscribers where so 
> far no business
> model evolved that would not compete with biger gains through siloed 
> platforms such as
> SP owned VoIP service (see above).

I spent a number of years as CTO of a large OTT VoIP service provider 
delivering "landline
replacement" telephony service over the public Internet.  It mostly 
works pretty well.
Where it doesn't work, I don't believe that QoS would actually "fix" the 
problem.  A
customer on the end of an ADSL circuit with uplink speed measured in 
kilobits, not
megabits was never going to have a great experience.  Those on the end 
of satellite
ISP service were just going to by stymied by speed-of-light latency that 
not even the ITU
can fix with QoS standards.  And some ISP last mile networks are just 
terribly operated.

When my VoIP services at home don't perform well, it's because there's 
physical layer
problems in the outside plant, not due to congestion or competing 
classes of application
traffic.  And from my time operating a VoIP service, my ear has become 
pretty well
attuned to VoIP CODEC artifacts due to, e.g, packet loss or excessive 
jitter.

We did quite a lot of call quality measurements sampled by way of 
observed delay jitter
primarily to get a sense of this.  Of course, my knowledge of this was 
10 years or more ago,
but since then last-mile networks have only increased in performance.  
And I'm still
a customer of that service and it continues to work well.

At last with VoIP, the mobile industry has gone quite a ways in training 
people to expect
worse quality than traditional landline telephony, so even the 
expectations have been
lowered.

Louis Mamakos