Do you have questions about the site? Write to bruce at perens.com .
List of all articles we've ever published.
Source Code
Developer's Documentation
RSS
XML Sitemap
XML News Sitemap
![[Valid RSS]](/images/valid-rss.png "Validate my RSS feed")
Tiered Internet vs. Selling Quality of Service
Internet providers are trying to figure out how to survive when their users are streaming gigabytes worth of media and making IP phone calls instead of viewing the web pages that their account pricing structure expected. Congress people are trying to find an incentive for network providers to build more infrastructure in a market that looks to be wildly more costly than present as bandwidth demand rises. Some suggest a tiered internet, making the big content companies pay the internet provider. But where does that leave the little guy with a political message that should be heard, the new startup with a disruptive technology, and the internet provider's competitor?
The solution to escalating bandwidth demands isn't a tiered internet, it's selling quality-of-service.
Streaming media and VoIP depend on quality-of-service, a very different quantity from raw bandwidth. Sure, your internet provider says you get six megabytes per second, but when, and how steadily? Those are the questions that quality-of-service guarantees answer.
Quality-of-service is frequently abbreviated as QoS. A VoIP phone call depends on real-time quality-of-service if it is to approach the routine quality standard of conventional telephone service. A certain number of bytes must be transmitted between each end of a connection every tenth of a second, and dropped packets will be noticed. If your internet provider pauses sending packets for a second, your phone call is cut off for that second.
But if you are viewing web pages instead of chatting on the phone, you might not even notice that one-second gap. While downloading a music file to be played later, you notice the speed at which the entire file is transferred, not whether the transfer is steady or goes in leaps and bounds.
Streaming media is different too. Usually, a streaming media viewer buffers many seconds of programming ahead of what you're seeing or listening to. Twenty seconds of buffer isn't unusual, and if a basketball game is delayed one minute from the real event, you'll probably be none the wiser. However many seconds your viewer has buffered, it can cover up that long a gap in transmission. So, the internet provider might slow down your connection for a minute during that basketball game, and you wouldn't notice. The quality-of-service required for streaming media includes the ability to deliver a certain number of bytes over time, but allows leaps, bounds, and gaps that would be intolerable for a VoIP call.
So, you can see that four different types of web usage each require a different quality of service. It's probable that your internet contract doesn't guarantee the quality of service required for VoIP or streaming media at all. That might have been OK when only alpha-Geeks used VoIP and streaming media, and they were like motorcyclists cutting between lanes of plodding cars. Now that so many more people are using facilities that demand a high quality-of-service, internet providers might not be able to provide it any longer. And they aren't obligated to do so.
Internet providers should be able to sell quality-of-service now. If you want VoIP, you should pay for VoIP quality-of-service. And of course the same for streaming media. If you don't pay for that, your account should still be fine for viewing web pages and downloading files that you view later. And it might still work for VoIP and streaming media, especially at times when there are fewer customers online.
Since customers won't generally want to read a quality-of-service specification, a technical thing of bandwidth and timing numbers, there's room for standards organizations to provide simple names for different sorts of quality-of-service guarantees that can be compared between different internet providers.
Operating systems and applications have a role in quality-of-service as well. Internet protocols include quality-of-service indicators that can be set for different sorts of use. Programs that view streaming media should set different indicators than ones that make VoIP calls, and programs that download files for later viewing should indicate that it's OK to let VoIP or streaming cut in front of them if necessary. Unfortunately, recent Microsoft operating systems always set the indicators to ask for the maximum possible quality-of-service at all times. Some non-Microsoft software does that too. I guess it makes benchmarks run faster, but at the cost of making it impossible to deliver a high quality-of-service where it's really needed. When software fibs about the quality-of-service it needs, your internet provider's router doesn't have the information it needs to give reliable service to a phone call at the cost of delaying a download for a second.
Providing the right quality-of-service indicators is a responsibility that all software vendors must now take seriously. And customers are going to have to take interest in the quality-of-service guarantees that come with their internet connection.
Bruce Perens