Question: Which RFC should I consult to determine acceptable delay and packet
loss?
RFCs are the result of IETF activities. The IETF is essentially a
protocol standardization group, not an operations group. I don't think
you perceive the IETF as "running" your network, or? There may not be
much of an alternative, though, which to a large extend is the issue at
hand. Nobody is responsible (individually or as a consortium or
whatever) of this anarchically organized and largely uncoordinated (at
a systemic level) global operational environment. While IETF/RFCs could
be utilized somehow, this is not really an issue of theirs. I sure
would not blame the IETF for not delivering here, is this is not their
mandate.
In other email I saw it seems that the important issues are hard to
understand for some. I (and I suspect several others) don't really care
much about a specific tactical issue (be it an outage or whatever).
The issue is how to make the system work with predictable performance
and a fate sharing attitude at a global level, in a commercial and
competitive environment that is still extremely young at that, and
attempts to accomodate everything from mom'n'pop shops to multi-billion
dollar industry. And exhibits exponential usage and ubiquity growth,
without the resources to upgrade quickly to satisfy all the demands.
And no control over in-flows, and major disparities across the
applications. And TCP flow control not working that well, as the
aggregation of transactions is very heavy, and the
packet-per-transaction count is so low on average that TCP may not be
all that much better to the network than UDP (in terms of adjusting to
jitter in available resources). Not to mention this age-old problem
with routing table sizes and routing table updates.
Hans;
Sorry...I waited for additional replies but you seemed to be the only one to
take my bait. My question was rhetorical.
I hear all this complaining on this forum about unacceptable delay and packet
loss by the ISP Community yet no "respected" industry standards body has yet
set QOS guidelines for ISP's! An old management dictum says "if its
important, measure it".
I know where to look for QOS criteria on my physical plant (T1/DS3's), I even
know where to look for QOS criteria for my old X.25 network. If we want
things to get better w/i the ISP Community...let's define what better is.
- jeff -
Question: Which RFC should I consult to determine acceptable delay and
packet
Other people have touched on it, but I'd like to re-iterate:
The quality that someone can expect out of their Internet connection,
as a practical matter, will somewhat vary with how much they're willing to
pay. It seems to me that giving someone <<1% downtime is an expensive
level of service. The Internet market today is not one where most customers
question the providers on the level of service; quite contrarily they
question the providers on how cheap they can go. This type of market
will be cost driven, and for my $19.95 unlimited PPP account, do you think
my ISP will be able to give me <<1% inaccessibility? Not without operating in
the red, I don't think.
I think most ISP's would be *delighted* to offer customers
Very High Quality service, but few customers are willing to pay for that
service. As a result, the final judgement of "how good is good enough"
will be "whatever the customer can live with," as compared to anything
that engineers like (ie 1%, 5%, etc).
Ed
ed@texas.net
(p.s. you notice I'm brushing aside the first question, being
"how do I *measure* the quality of service." Offhand, a weighted average
of all of the components that a given customer needs for a connection
makes the most sense to me.)