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Re: Enterprise VoIP Peering Point?

At 4:59 PM +0000 on 8/11/04, Paul Vixie wrote:
> I've heard this a few times in the past few weeks:
"Sorry, my vonage phone is breaking up. Can you repeat that?" 

yeah, me too.  but as you point out...

 Many of the folks that I talk to who are using un-prioritized
 bandwidth into their homes/small businesses frequently have
 problems. These are DSL and Cable users.


...that's a last mile congestion issue, having nothing to do with
interprovider-RSVP or any other "hard" problems.  prioritizing the
traffic at the last mile is "easy" compared to interprovider-RSVP.

if an enduser or enterprise decides to do native voip over a congested
last-mile link without traffic prioritization, then no amount of
interprovider-RSVP or "voip peering" will help them.

i'm not saying the problem doesn't exist.  i'm saying there's more than
one problem, and that the one "in the middle" would be nearly impossible
to solve -- if it still existed.


I am under the impression that most VOIP quality problems in Western nations (not picking on any one vendor in particular) are due to two primary issues (though these are not the ONLY issues):

1) Last-mile upstream congestion - bursty traffic by non-VOIP applications on the same pipe causes undesirable artifacts or packet loss. This is perhaps solvable by use of VOIP-aware bandwidth regulation CPE (vendor alert: I design/sell these). Putting two ethernet ports (switch, router, whatever) on the phone widget and forcing all the other traffic in the network through the QoS metrics on the phone widget seems to be the most easily installed solution in environments where the network is out of the control of the VOIP provider or even the end user. This creates a situation where the VoIP device is the bandwidth regulator for outbound traffic, and then it can gauge allowable traffic from internal systems based on what it "thinks" is left on the upstream pipe after subtracting the VOIP channel usage. This also leads to a very large pool of topologically distributed systems that have some very interesting metrics available, as a side bonus.

2) Poor core network architecture by VoIP carriers, specifically, reliance on one or two transit carriers which may have inadequate interconnections to end-user aggregation networks, meaning [dsl, cable modem, business service] providers. This is solvable by more diverse transit choices, or even peering at layer 3 when traffic gets to that level.

JT

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