Lee Dryburgh — a friend and recovering SS7 signalling guru — has stumbled upon a barbed and thoroughly wicked anonymous denunciation of the “Quality of Service” efforts of some distressed incumbent telcos. He’s posted it up over at TelephonyDiscussion.com.
Posted by Martin Geddes at 01:45 AMTrackBack URL for this entry:
http://www.telepocalypse.net/cgi-sys/cgiwrap/mgeddes/MT/mt-tb.cgi/715.
The article failed to mention the fact that Martians are part of the evil QoS conspiracy, and may have actually brainwashed the Telcos with the idea in the first place. Other than that, it was a fair imitation of the X-Files, suitable for any Net Neutrality conference.
I especially enjoyed the formatting.
Posted by: at May 17, 2006 02:26 AMThis is a great article and I agree almost completely. The Telcos have lost sight of what their customers want - they want Skype, Google, p2p and all the rest - that's the value of the Internet (or the pipe they buy from the Telco) and that's why they buy it in the first place. That's why I'm not too worried about all this QoS/Net Neutrality stuff. There will be a huge user backlash plus technical innovation simply moves too fast at the edge for the Telcos to keep up with - people will work out how to get around any restrictions.
That said there is a problem. The Telcos are not just moaning without cause. There has been a huge increase in the volume of data that they have to carry. Yes Moore's law helps but a) Moore's Law doesn't go in a straight line. There tend to be step changes in technology that lead to big cost reductions but at other times there is little cost reduction. Plus when you deploy a "system" it has to be filled before you can move to another system built on newer technology that carries more bits for less. So you cannot just keep absorbing traffic increases on the assumption that your capital costs decline at the same rate - they don't. b) The prices of bandwidth have fallen substantially faster than the costs of providing it (Moore's Law or not). Yes that's the nature of the market because there are too many providers but it is also a fact that has to be dealt with. If they all go bust we have no Internet. If there are less competitors then the prices will go up more than they need to.
However, I think the answer is in the Telcos own hands but it is an answer that may not be palatable for all. It is also an answer that means the Telcos need to recognise that they are just pipe providers or bit carriers. They can never expect to compete with the speed of innovation of the edge providers. And they can certainly never do that when they can only ever provide a walled garden service - each telco only has a tiny proportion of all the Internet users actually connected.
At the moment the Telcos are competing with each other to provide ever faster broadband lines at the same or lower price to their users. They then complain when their users actually use those lines and generate lots of traffic.
The Telcos must move to a charging model that has some form of usage element to it. They then benefit from increasing usage. We benefit by not having any application limited, slowed, rate capped or whatever and the people that are hugely heavy users of bandwidth pay more than the light user. In that way we can have really cheap Internet access available to even the most disadvantaged in our society (because low useage access prices are cheap) so everyone has access to information - it has been proven many times that lack of access to information hinders the most disadvantaged in our society. But the people that want to push usage through mainly entertainment usages (or business useage) pay more.
QoS is not necessary as you can always overprovision bandwidth but you cannot stick your head in the sand and ignore the fact that there is a cost of providing that bandwidth. And the cost of providing that bandwidth IS NOT falling as fast as the demand is increasing.
Posted by: at May 18, 2006 11:21 AM