[ih] "The First Router" on Jeopardy

[Toerless Eckert]

On Tue, Nov 23, 2021 at 03:52:49PM -0800, Tony Li wrote:
> > Obviously, i think there could and should be more.
> That would be nice, but in practice, it hasn’t found a market.  Best Effort (or Lousy Effort) typically results in 99.999% of the packets making it to their destination with perfectly acceptable reliability, delay, and jitter. When SP’s have attempted to charge a premium for the remaining 0.001%, they have found that almost all customers were not interested, and those that did pay the premium did not feel that it was worthwhile.

My experience from enterprises and SP-services-for Enterprises such as L3VPN
are somehwat different. QoS was and probably still is a fairly well
selling service. Arguably you always need some such service if you need
to guarantee services, and for example contribution TV is not using
rate adaptive video, and certainly should never want to because at
the end of the contribution path you want 100% of the input bandwidth,
and not less on a friday evening. Aka: any actual "real-time" traffic
will predominantly have trrhoughput, and arguably many will also have
latency and even more so reliability requirements.

And don't even let me get into the politics of selling better network
transport features only as part of much more expensive and often badly
worked out application services. IP Multicast for example was for sure
never be made available to OTT by access-SPs to their subscribres to
protect the SPs own IPTV service offering against competition, and
i was often enough involved back when the SPs feared regulation that
would have forced them offer such a service.

> The ultra-extreme folks who want the ultimate reliability are not willing to have SPs in the loop in the first place.

Unless they have a service where on one side you have a larger
customer base that you don't want/cant wire up yourself.

> But back to the point: the mechanisms are all in place for constrained path computation for various different traffic classes and applications if people choose to turn them on. Some do.

We have a bunch of 25 year old wierd building blocks, but
SPs have to business concept competency to make something from them.

I do also count mostly on challengers building better networks
for future services than expecting existing SPs to figure out
how to make new money from new opportunities.

Cheers
    Toerless

> T
> 

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tte at cs.fau.de