RE: Is anyone actually USING IP QoS?

[Vadim Antonov <avg () kotovnik com>]

Steve Riley (MCS) <steriley () microsoft com> wrote:

> Nice to see that I'm not the only one believing in the foolishness of QoS
> hype.

Er... me, agreeing with someone from Microsoft?  Yeech!  (just kidding :)

> Allow me to point you to an interesting paper called "Rise of the Stupid
> Network."

Unfortunately that paper oversimplifies the whole congestion control
issue by completely ignoring the fact that data traffic has a
heavy-tailed distribution.  Which pretty much means that no matter
how much capacity is there, as long as there's oversubscription
there will be at least transient traffic jams.

Which means that the issue of what to do with different types
of traffic when there's a congestion cannot be just pooh-poohed.

The big problem with G.711 and its progeny is the lack of effective
cooperative congestion control which would guarantee network stability
(like TCP does).  Fortunately, the bulk of network traffic is
"canned" content, which can (and should) be transmitted with TCP.

--vadim