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

[Jere Retzer <jere@easystreet.com>]

Alex Bligh wrote:

> --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 don't think it's true in Oregon, let alone across the pond. A couple 
weeks ago I tested H.323 video with a DSL user on the coast who has 
symetric 256k and the voice was unsusable due to jitter. My end at work 
is fine. Same result over multiple calls while ensuring all the ports 
were open, firewalls downed temporarily, etc. Turns out his phone 
company sends all the packets to Denver then back through Seattle to get 
to me in Portland. When queried, my friend was informed that the links 
were all lightly loaded, less than 29% so the problem wasn't theirs. I'd 
argue that 29% is probably much too high for sensitive traffic - but 
what is the standard btw? He's upgraded now to a half meg each way and 
we'll do some more testing.

As for last mile problems, here in Portland at home I use a very large 
cable company's broadband service and I gave up on Vonage because the 
cable basically saturated every morning between 10:00 and noon - echos, 
connection down/unavailable, you name it. Also, my ATA was between my 
cable modem and router so the advertised prioritization scheme should 
have worked.  I was pretty disappointed to return the Vonage ATA within 
the two week trial period. Vonage itself seems like a great company. I 
hope to try again if the cable service becomes more reliable.

Jere



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