Re: [81attendees] sucky Delta hotel network (and bufferbloat)

[Roland Bless <[e-mail]>]

Hi Carlos,

On 04.08.2011 17:50, Carlos M. Martinez wrote:
> I fail to see a better argument for implementing QoS than what happened
> to the Delta Hotel in QC. I agree that QoS has been somewhat bastardized

QoS is there for differentiation of packet/flow treatment,
i.e., managed unfairness, while congestion management tries
to provide fairness between users/flows in a best-effort class.
QoS still doesn't solve the problem of trying to share the capacity
between users in the same QoS class.

> Arguing that every network should always be overprovisioned encourages
> wasteful behaviour on all parts and puts many players in an impossible
> position. It might be not so impossible in the US/Canada (although even

Yes, indeed, DDoS flooding, misbehaving flows and unbalanced traffic
matrices may still cause problems for overprovisioned networks.

> Dropping packets is a bad thing. However, dropping packets blindly (as
> in pretending congestion does not exist) is much worse. The network
> should avoid dropping packets at all costs, but if it has to drop, then
> it should do it smartly and avoid making the situation worse.

Yes, but this is also true for more clever congestion management schemes.

> I do believe there is a management problem in the same sense as there is
> with CGNs and port forwarding, which has lead to the creation of PCP. It
> is basically a remote management protocol allowing customer-provider
> interaction (ATM UNI anyone ??? :-)))) ). Well, maybe we could do
> something for QoS. Phoning your ISP each time you need to forward a port
> is every bit as impracticable as phoning the ISP to create a QoS queue.

There are signaling solutions out there for this, e.g., NSIS
http://tools.ietf.org/wg/nsis/ provided solutions for both
Port management for NAT/Firewalls as well as for QoS signaling.
Giving a tool into the users' hand so that they can actually
decide what is more important and should be treated with better
QoS would be a good thing also from the perspective of net neutrality.
But the complexity of providing everything (control plane + DiffServ
etc.) for QoS support is obviously still a too high effort.

Regards,
 Roland