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To: Frank A. Coluccio who wrote (3164)	3/18/2000 3:14:00 PM
From: Dennis O'Bell	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 5853

Hi Frank - well, my feeling, shared by many people, is that since the internet is really in the wild-west land-grab days, there is a lot of leeway for "inquality" of service, but as the service matures everyone will come to expect much higher reliability, and not just mission critical power users. Something like TeraBeam fits in very well, at least it's highly plausible that it could work much of the time in most places. Certainly in Arizona or New Mexico I'd expect it to be pretty reliable. But I'd find it exasperating if here in New England, cooped up during a blizzard I couldn't get on the net! The internet (for end users) is really just a toy at present. This is why I don't agree with the bell-heads vs net-heads argument about flexibility of QoS, in the long run as the services mature we should move toward quite high QoS levels, and users will be annoyed if this is not the case. One should understand I don't come from the flaky Microsoft PC space, where it's just normal to have to reboot when your Windows 95 laptop hangs. I'm used to DEC VAX systems that stay up for an entire year, 24/24, 7/7 and am absolutely appalled at the fact that so many PC users have never known reliability like what I was used to, and take for granted the capriciousness of computers today, where we've made some real steps backwards, thanks to Mr Softee.