Re: Did Internet Founders Actually Anticipate Paid, Prioritized Traffic?

[JC Dill <jcdill.lists () gmail com>]

Jack Bates wrote:
> And yet, I'm pretty sure there are providers that have different pipes 
> for business than they do for consumer, and probably riding some of 
> the same physical medium. This creates saturated and unsaturated 
> pipes, which is just as bad or worse than using QOS. The reason I'm 
> pretty sure about it, is business circuits generally are guaranteed, 
> while consumer are not. 

I'm pretty sure you are mistaken.  The reason is, it's adding an 
additional layer of complexity inside the network for no good reason.  
The only difference between the guaranteed speed provided to business 
circuits and the not-guaranteed consumer circuits is if they get a 
reduction in their fees if the ISP can't deliver (business customers), 
AND they notice the outage, AND they complain and ask for a credit, AND 
the outage is long enough to trigger the contract clause for reducing 
the fee.  The complaint structure is rigged in favor of the ISP.  
Further the easiest way to avoid paying out is simply to have enough 
capacity across their entire network that they don't have capacity 
related outages.  Most outages are the result of equipment failures, and 
if they have a separate network for business and consumer customers it 
just makes the outage that much worse for whatever network is affected, 
leading to more complaints, more refunds (to those customers).

"I encourage all my competitors to do that."

jc