Re: [p2pi] One more proposed definition of fairness...

[Richard Bennett <richard at bennett.com>]

Comment below:

Henning Schulzrinne wrote:

On Jun 9, 2008, at 3:00 PM, Richard Bennett wrote:

Accepting statistical multiplexing as a design constraint from the get-go will help this group make faster progress.

The problem is that we'll get systems that are not going to work as advertised, from a user perspective.

We already have such systems, largely because we don't know how to mandate meaningful disclosure. It strikes me as going the wrong way around to say that ISPs have to provide CIR because that's the only thing that can be adequately communicated to the customer in a way that he can't misunderstand. If we go that way, we lose the benefits of packet networking in the burst scenario and most of the economics go down the tube as well. So rather than back off statistical multiplexing, it strikes me as more beneficial to develop some standard metrics that enable consumer advocates, if not consumers themselves, to evaluate different services.

These metrics would include "mean information rates" at various levels of latency, the critical piece of a "buckets of packets" system. I'd like to be able to shop for an Internet access account that provided me with a bandwidth/latency profile that enabled me to successfully get one VoIP session through at the same time that three people surfed the web and four video stream downloads are in progress. There's no technical barrier to building such a network service, once the video stream downloads are managed as scavenger class activities (less that BE) and the VoIP is managed as a better-than-BE service.

But how would the ISP advertise this service? The terms that are needed aren't part of the marketing lexicon at the moment, so they really do need to be developed.

I mention this here because the next step after developing standards for P2P Infrastructure improvements, whether the system is based on optimum route discovery or caching, will be to communicate to the market that the system is in place and working at ISP XYZ. Are they going to say "Blazing Internet Service, now with Oracles and Scavengers!!!", or what?

RB

-- 
Richard Bennett

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