[e2e] not quite the differentiated services I was thinking of

Kathleen Nichols nichols at pollere.com
Fri Oct 21 13:13:57 PDT 2005


Though, as a user, this may not be what you want, no one
should be surprised that differentiated services as a
way of *controlling* network usage is important to operators.
I believe this was brought up as far back as the fdiffs BoF
Brian Carpenter organized and I know the cable data company
I worked for 10 years ago was interested in providing its customers,
the operators, with that kind of control over subscriber use
(though it was through the MAC layer).

There was a lot of discussion in the diffserv WG about differentiation
that limited users, Yoram Bernet brought it up as a needed service
for enterprises (for much the reasons in the article) as did Klaus
Wehrle and Roland Bless, who proposed a lower effort PHB. Brian
Carpenter and I felt this was a PDB function not a PHB function
and sketched this as a "Bulk Handling" PDB which got combined with Klaus
and Roland's work into RFC3662 for a "Lower Effort PDB".

So the notion of using differentiated services to control the
network has been around for a while. Seems pretty reasonable
to me that a network operator ought to be able to choose who
gets better service and who gets worse service based on whatever
is important (often $$$ commercially).

	Kathie


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