Re: last mile prioritization (was Re: Enterprise VoIP Peering Point? )

[Alex Bligh <alex@alex.org.uk>]

--On 11 August 2004 20:00 +0000 Paul Vixie <paul@vix.com> wrote:

> > On the topic of congestion and the questioned need for prioritization --
> > Jasleen Kaur's group at UNC-CH is studying the presence of congestion in
> > the Internet. It turns out to be non-trivial to find it.
>
> indeed.  endusers who can't run their MMORPG's have already taught their
> dsl and cablemodem providers to maintain enough headroom to their peers;
> enterprise and datacenter customers are now receiving competitive SLA's
> from their transit providers.  bankrupt fiber/wavelength assets are being
> sold/leased at a fraction of their construction costs.  datacenters are
> almost invariably carrier-neutral now, just to stay in business.  we are
> just not living in a congestion-in-the-middle world any more, and the
> trend looks pretty good.

Is that true on (say) US<->Asia routes these days? Or Europe<->MiddleEast?
I say that, as it seems to me there's a pretty good correlation between
poor availability of fiber and regulatory arbitrage that makes it longhaul
POTS to VoIP substitution viable. I don't know if the lack of fiber
availability is sufficient to cause congestion a-la 95/96/97, but I've
had some traceroutes into india and south africa which suggest it might
be.

I am aware that at least in a free market environment the foregoing should
be a short term effect; however, equally the availability of
fiber/wavelength assets at below construction costs should similarly be a
short term problem (for some variant of short term).

Given protocols seem to take longer to design and deploy (a point you've
made before) than new companies can pop up, raise piles of cash in a boom,
build a huge fiber network and go bust, I wonder whether we are safe in the
assumption that middle congestion isn't going to be a factor at any time
within the near-term protocol design window. IE may be we are lucky enough
not to need to worry about middle congestion now on most routes, but
we need to think about how to do it lest it become a problem before we
have a protocol ready to tackle it.

Alex

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