[e2e] Re: crippled Internet

[Vernon Schryver]

> From: smd at ebone.net (Sean Doran)

> So is it fair to ask if there is a relationship between people's
> acceptance of poorer quality when the charging regime is very different
> (and cheaper), just as there is an apparent relationship between
> people's acceptance of poorer quality when there is a substantial
> feature change (e.g., GSM in general)?
>
> It's not like I'm just saying, "let the market decide", but rather
> wondering if anyone has good guesses at what the decision might be
> if ISPs focused on offering good-enough-for-data quality as usual,
> rather than tightening things up to some ITU standard for delay&jitter.

Which ISPs?  Those running OC 192 simply cannot delay packets enough to
matter, unless they run very strong and wrong type-of-service queuing.

"Let the market decide" is a tautology as well as a cliche.  Why don't
you use VoIP now?  A 3 hour international conference call is still
expensive enough to worry about, but is there any hope of using desktop
VoIP for something serious enough to spend the expensive time of a
lot of people?  At the other extreme, would you ask someone to hassle
with VoIP so you can save the cost of a 10 minute phone call, even if
you pay all of your own phone bill?

Even if VoIP were always "toll quality," the market for VoIP is at the
big telcos and big companies that buy long haul, non-switched bandwidth
for their internal data and voice traffic.  There are (or were) plenty of
big outfits that pay (paid?) such as Sprint significantly more than
$1M/month for private bandwidth, and use (used?) most of it for voice.
There are plenty of outfits selling telephone-to-IP gateways and
more than a few apparently relevant Internet Drafts.

VoIP is a lot like the video conferencing.  The token ring and 100VG
salescritters that said CSMA/CD doesn't work also said that we must buy
their Technology because everyone was going to switch to desktop video.
(I never understood why people think that seeing faces matters on phone
calls.  Just as people don't have trouble with the delays of 50 feet,
in many conversations people don't care about not seeing the other
person, as when talking over cube walls.)  VoIP is will be important as
commercial video conferencing is, not on desktop computers but in big
corporate and telco facilities.


Vernon Schryver    vjs at rhyolite.com