About every corporate ISP in this world will try to sell you some kind of QoS Service on top of the ‘wholesale jungle network’: MPLS, Diffserv, etc. You get to pay more for a special ‘premium’ and optimized network where the right bits are delivered faster than the other ones or not delivered at all. Well, this guy says that the all concept of Qos is broken, but from a economic perspective:
This was the outline of a paper I planned to write, but for which I just have too little time to get it finished. My main point is that QoS mechanisms in a network are a bad idea ™ This is generally examined from a technical point of view. The arguments are either generally that we tried it and it didn’t work. There is little research on that evaluates the economical side. The little research that there is, generally argues that QoS mechanisms could work if all parties in a communication chain just work together and the reason they don’t is because of the lack of incentives. I belief there are several reasons why QoS can’t work and why it is a failure of logic.
In many business cases surrounding QoS mechanisms there is an assumption that QoS enabled traffic that has been paid for, has a higher value to the user than data that has not been paid for. This sounds logical from an economical point of view if money is an adequate proxy. However it isn’t. Compare a VoIP call that clashes with a pay per view movie. If the VoIP call is about an important subject (birth of child) than it has priority for the receiver, regardless of the QoS level paid for.
So, if QoS is broken and your network is acting slow, what is the solution? Well, overengineer your network, that it’s the same thing to say: upgrade your pipes. It’s a Layer 1 problem, not Layer2-7.
Interesting read.
