Between May 1998 and October 2001, Internet2 worked to specify and deploy the QBone Premium Service (QPS) [QBone], an interdomain virtual leased-line IP service built on diff-serv [RFC2475] forwarding primitives and hereafter referred to simply as “Premium”. Despite considerable effort and success with proof-of-concept demonstrations, this effort yielded no operational deployments and has been suspended indefinitely.

In this document, we attempt to explain the reasons for this failure. The focus is on non-architectural, and largely non-technical, obstacles to deployment, foremost among them: Premium’s poor incremental deployment properties, intimidating new complexity for network operators, missing functionality on routers, and serious economic challenges.

The costs of Premium are too high relative to the perceived benefits. Moreover, even if successfully deployed, Premium fundamentally changes the Internet architecture, running contrary to the end-to-end design principle, and threatening the future scalability and flexibility of the Internet. The conclusions reached herein apply not just to Premium, but to any IP quality of service (QoS) architecture offering a service guarantee.

You don’t have to be an engineer to grasp these key points: Internet2 hasn’t looked at this problem in over five years; their failure to make it work was not related to “architectural issues” as much as deployment issues; the researchers invoke religion (“end-to-end”) to explain why they feel they shouldn’t look too closely at DiffServ.

Reading on, you’ll see that the ultimate hang-up I2 encountered was a feature of the old-fashioned routers they used: in those days, QoS was implemented in firmware, not in hardware, so there was an automatic 30% performance hit in turning it on. Today’s routers do this in hardware, so the issue goes away completely.

Bachula’s testimony was both misleading and harmful, and because of it I’d like to see federal funding for Internet2 suspended.

There are however business concerns in the real world. Business concerns such as resource scarcity and profit. In a ISP business model, users are charged for service. If usage goes up, but subscriptions do not (e.g. average user consumes more bandwidth) there is financial motivation to prioritize or shape the network, not to add capacity and sacrifice profit with higher outlays of capital, as long as the ‘quality’ or ‘satisfaction’ as observed by the consumer does not suffer.

We can compare this to the freeways systems in some ways. Should we simply add capacity or should we both capacity and intelligence? Is it better to build new freeways to solve every transportation problem, or do traffic congestion maps, signs, radio broadcasts etc also make sense?

Does automobile built-in GPS + Maps showing traffic congestion cost too much and require too much processing power?

And don’t let us forget about Moore’s law, processing double every 18 months or so (or at least transistor count does). What is expensive and complex today will be cheap and simple soon due to the exponential increase in computational capability.

Additionally, the researchers line of reason also only extends to a bandwidth infinite network. For example, wireless networks nearly require prioritization schemes to function both at capacity and performance. This is something we learned the hard way in WLANs (and why city wide WLANs won’t work in the long run). In this case, the frequency is a scarce resource that must be shared as effectively as possible. Many argue the best way to do this in a WWAN (such as Mobile WiMAX) is through priortization and service differentiation for customers, e.g. One user who primarily wants downloads can and should pay a different price than another user who requires VoIP phones to always work and can live with less download throughput. Tagging these packets differently at an edge device is already trivial and soon to be simpler, additional prioritizing in the core isn’t too far behind.

Should user A be forced to suffer in his occasional new video watching because user B steals pornography content via peer to peer networks all hours of the day?

In a more fundamental sense, Internet connections are valuable resources that require infrastructure. Resources need to be distributed. In capatilist system we use private ownership to distribute these resources via the communication medium of money (most efficient system discovered so far!). The government should referee but not play goalie in this distribution game. Therefore, I believe that private enterprises will have the motivation to shape and prioritize traffic and then will. As long as the government referees the game and doesn’t play, we will have the most efficient distribution of these resources as these ISP will compete for our dollars. Much better than the government stealing our dollars and then running the network as they see fit.

There are however business concerns in the real world. Business concerns such as resource scarcity and profit. In a ISP business model, users are charged for service. If usage goes up, but subscriptions do not (e.g. average user consumes more bandwidth) there is financial motivation to prioritize or shape the network, not to add capacity and sacrifice profit with higher outlays of capital, as long as the ‘quality’ or ‘satisfaction’ as observed by the consumer does not suffer.

We can compare this to the freeways systems in some ways. Should we simply add capacity or should we both capacity and intelligence? Is it better to build new freeways to solve every transportation problem, or do traffic congestion maps, signs, radio broadcasts etc also make sense?

Does automobile built-in GPS + Maps showing traffic congestion cost too much and require too much processing power?

And don’t let us forget about Moore’s law, processing double every 18 months or so (or at least transistor count does). What is expensive and complex today will be cheap and simple soon due to the exponential increase in computational capability.

Additionally, the researchers line of reason also only extends to a bandwidth infinite network. For example, wireless networks nearly require prioritization schemes to function both at capacity and performance. This is something we learned the hard way in WLANs (and why city wide WLANs won’t work in the long run). In this case, the frequency is a scarce resource that must be shared as effectively as possible. Many argue the best way to do this in a WWAN (such as Mobile WiMAX) is through priortization and service differentiation for customers, e.g. One user who primarily wants downloads can and should pay a different price than another user who requires VoIP phones to always work and can live with less download throughput. Tagging these packets differently at an edge device is already trivial and soon to be simpler, additional prioritizing in the core isn’t too far behind.

Should user A be forced to suffer in his occasional new video watching because user B steals pornography content via peer to peer networks all hours of the day?

In a more fundamental sense, Internet connections are valuable resources that require infrastructure. Resources need to be distributed. In capatilist system we use private ownership to distribute these resources via the communication medium of money (most efficient system discovered so far!). The government should referee but not play goalie in this distribution game. Therefore, I believe that private enterprises will have the motivation to shape and prioritize traffic and then will. As long as the government referees the game and doesn’t play, we will have the most efficient distribution of these resources as these ISP will compete for our dollars. Much better than the government stealing our dollars and then running the network as they see fit.