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To: neverenough who wrote (3355)	12/5/1998 10:33:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (2) \| Respond to of 29970

There are some obvious, and then not so obvious, forces at play. In previous posts both here and over in the Last Mile thread I've spoken about the incentives that many of the last mile players have to do just the opposite of what you are calling for. That is, there is an incentive in some ways to actually limit the amount of throughput that you receive by some of the last mile service providers. The reasons for this become esoteric, or deeply rooted in ulterior motives, at some level, but they exist just the same. Your question is fair enough: >>My question to you is how will they deploy quality of service? Will it be through bandwidth management devices that will manage the flow of TCP/IP traffic, or maybe P-NAP's(Private Network Access Points) << All the ways you've just mentioned, plus intelligent means of caching, some judicious use of satellites, and improved edge technologies that can attach directly to hosts through virtual circuit means, rather than taking the long way home. But there is no silver bullet solution, I'm afraid, from what I can see today. It'll continue to be a game of economics and value tradeoffs, despite what many are saying will be a free ride in the future. Far from it, in fact, unless all you want to do is send a little bit of email and a few voice messages. But emerging applications will require a robust infrastructure, which is going to cost. One way or the other. >>Why can't we all just have a big, fat pipe that provides all the bandwidth we ever need?<< The rules as they are currently written for bandwidth, and the ports that accept that bandwidth in routers, dictates that increases in cost per port are roughly proportionate to the increase in bandwidth-handling capabilities. Mainly economic reasons, in other words. And for every aggregate increase produced by the sum total of all users [multiply near-infinity * 200,000 users in a cableco serving area] with increased bandwidth at their disposal, so too must there be a corresponding, although not altogether linear [unless there is a special event taking place], increase in the amount of bandwidth available between the ISP and the Core. Even more expensive, when you consider that the mainstay routers upstream, too, must be increased in size, along with the pipes beyond them, with additional costs incurred each and every step along the way.