The tiered Internet conundrum

Just how do we get usable Internet service from that series of tubes? This is the twisty turney plumbing problem unearthed in recent reports that Voice over IP traffic is suffering a less than first class treatment out in the big bad Internet.

The solution of course is to add tiered service levels, so called traffic prioritization or in fully buzzword compliant terms things like 802.11p or IPv6 precedence labeling, oh er. However, this is not necessarily the big bad "tiered Internet" everyone has fear and loathing over, not if its done right.

Personally I have no qualms about providers offering tiered service - if I did a lot of VoIP calling I'd not only appreciate priority treatment of my VoIP packets, I'd actually expect to pay for it. After all without being required to pay for it what is to stop any one customer demanding their packets priority over everyone else for nothing, its a free good everyone would want to load up on. The consequence could well be, when we've all maxed-out on cheap VoIP calling and movie stream, not much of anything for anyone. But as far as I can tell what needs to happen is we regulate against network providers prioritizing based on source and destination, only type of traffic.

So if you're going to offer a fast lane for VoIP traffic on the public internet then you offer it to all VoIP traffic equally, no source or destination discrimination allowed. If you want to provide source or destination discriminated tiers then you have to provide a seperate tube (yeah, I said tube) for that traffic that is routed, metered and charged completely separately - just like if I, as a customer, paid for a dedicated T1 link for my own personal use.

Would that work, or is it any different from what network providers want anyway? I think so, or at least it could do if implemented correctly. The danger is of course that these extra "toll tubes" (to push the whole sorry tube metaphor) are not separate tubes at all, but carved out of the proletariats networking tubes that as we all know are otherwise stuffed 90% to the gills with liberal propaganda and other s**t the media would rather we didn't receive in a timely manner. As many people point out, if ISPs would just give us unfettered access to the bandwidth they say they are providing us then there just wouldn't be a problem.

The reality is that a 6Mbps "blazingly fast" cable download speed will slow to a crawl when everyone in our building starts looking for 6Mbps. 6Mbps is just a maximum that on average no one will get, or get for long. As for upload speed and latency - which is important for apps like VoIP, forget about it! A few peer-to-peer downloads clogging your gateway's subnet with packets will bring everything to a crawl and there isn't a damn thing you can do about it.

Finally, I would like to posit that perhaps the cited VoIP call quality study could be flawed - did it adequately distinguish between VoIP users that use 801.11p to prioritize their own VoIP traffic back to the ISP? If not then the degradation in quality could be purely a side effect of home networks carry more and more residual traffic (streaming content, peeer-to-peer downloads etc) that is disrupting delivery of VoIP within the home network.