Bill,
Scott:
In general I agree with you. I was careful to say that there will be lots of
national backbone bandwidth e.g. Qwest's new OC192 network, MCI and AT&T
upgrades etc. There still exists major problems with bandwidth in an around
major metropolitan areas like Chicago and NY that are not likely to be
resolved soon. And as you have pointed out the regulators are always a wild
card in terms of available bandwidth and pricing.
In Canada, we have been very fortunate in having excess fibre capacity in and
around our major metropolitan areas, with more coming on line every day. The
problem has become so acute, that in Toronto we probably have the lowest ATM
circuit prices anywhere in North America. In Montreal the local university
GigaPOP consortium is pulling their own 40 strand fibre through the city
ducts at a cost less than one year's tariff that the carrier wanted for a DS3
connection between these same institutions.
The question in my mind is how long will it take to get QoS/CoS working
effectively over heterogenous networks with all the related business issues
of settlements, etc versus how long it will take for the facilities providers
to plow new fibre into the ground?
If the fibre shortage is resolved quickly and all these promised WDM and
optical technologies come to pass than the QoS/CoS business issues may prove
to be an interesting technical challenge but never get wide commercial
deployment.
Bill
Bill,
--
However, I always alike to be a bit contrarian and point out that QoS or
Multicast may never be needed because of the explosive growth of fiber
bandwidth. I believe, in the future, it will be a lot easier and cheaper
to
deploy bandwidth rather than manage complex router/switch technology to
support QoS/CoS.
--I think this is a myth, at least for now - the production of fiber in the
world was 1.25 million fiber miles short of demand last year and is
expeced to be about the same this year. IN addition rights of way are
getting rather hard to obtain. WDM will be a great help but it does
not cause fiber to be run into Seattle.The cost of putting down fiber is still very high (particularally across
the ponds) and even with WDM the cost of bandwidth will continue
to be high. Yes the cost should drop (assuming that it is not
kept high by other things like telco or government policies) but
we ain't going to see "bandwidth too cheap to measure" (as someone
put it on comm-priv 2 years ago) in any timeframe that will let the
Internet community avoid looking at QoS as a very real issue.Scott
.
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