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How about a corollary: why should your neighbor's torrents slow down just because you are making a bunch of phone calls? (And remember, people are using torren

by ericflo 16y ago

How about a corollary: why should your neighbor's torrents slow down just because you are making a bunch of phone calls? (And remember, people are using torrents for legitimate purposes, like how Blizzard uses it to distribute purchased copies of Starcraft II.) The solution is to fix overall network capacity.

pvg 16y ago
That's a 'fix' if network capacity were infinite. You can rephrase your corollary as 'why should my VOIP calls drop just because I'm downloading StarCraft II'. There isn't anything inherently evil in the notion that you might want to prioritize, say, latency-dependent traffic over traffic that isn't.
- nostrademons 16y ago
  Haven't people done studies on this and found that the cost to implement QoS is greater than the cost to just increase network bandwidth? That may not hold forever, but it holds now in the U.S. Current residential broadband lines in the U.S. could go much faster with zero technical effort. They're capped because Verizon and Comcast only give you enough bandwidth to make sure that you get more than you would with a competitor. They hold the rest in reserve so that they can raise speeds and please customers easily when a competitor raises speeds. We've got the slowest Internet speeds in the developed world, and you can bet it isn't because of technological reasons: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1004/ http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1004/
  - pvg 16y ago
    My point was that 'adding bandwidth' is not actually a solution to congestion-related problems. Double the bandwidth, now StartCraft II downloads in two instead of four hours, during which time your VOIP calls still drop. This is not unlike a problem urban planners have run across - adding lanes to a thoroughfare often does not relieve traffic congestion. So unless you can add bandwidth indefinitely so that there is never, ever any congestion, the issues are somewhat orthogonal.
Locke1689 16y ago
Spoken like someone who doesn't understand QoS. QoS uses latency-aware networking to push low-latency packets closer to the top of the queue. That doesn't necessarily mean that they get full bandwidth priority. VoIP calls may delay Bittorrent packets by a couple tenths of a second. In other words, low-latency applications are usually inelastic, while file transfers are usually elastic.

by ericflo 16y ago

pvg 16y ago

That's a 'fix' if network capacity were infinite. You can rephrase your corollary as 'why should my VOIP calls drop just because I'm downloading StarCraft II'. There isn't anything inherently evil in the notion that you might want to prioritize, say, latency-dependent traffic over traffic that isn't.

nostrademons 16y ago
Haven't people done studies on this and found that the cost to implement QoS is greater than the cost to just increase network bandwidth? That may not hold forever, but it holds now in the U.S. Current residential broadband lines in the U.S. could go much faster with zero technical effort. They're capped because Verizon and Comcast only give you enough bandwidth to make sure that you get more than you would with a competitor. They hold the rest in reserve so that they can raise speeds and please customers easily when a competitor raises speeds. We've got the slowest Internet speeds in the developed world, and you can bet it isn't because of technological reasons: http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1004/ http://www.websiteoptimization.com/bw/1004/
- pvg 16y ago
  My point was that 'adding bandwidth' is not actually a solution to congestion-related problems. Double the bandwidth, now StartCraft II downloads in two instead of four hours, during which time your VOIP calls still drop. This is not unlike a problem urban planners have run across - adding lanes to a thoroughfare often does not relieve traffic congestion. So unless you can add bandwidth indefinitely so that there is never, ever any congestion, the issues are somewhat orthogonal.

Locke1689 16y ago

Spoken like someone who doesn't understand QoS. QoS uses latency-aware networking to push low-latency packets closer to the top of the queue. That doesn't necessarily mean that they get full bandwidth priority. VoIP calls may delay Bittorrent packets by a couple tenths of a second. In other words, low-latency applications are usually inelastic, while file transfers are usually elastic.