The need for a smarter prioritized Internet
Quality of Service (QoS) Network prioritization is a very complex technology that is often misunderstood and maligned. Because it is difficult to explain in words and pictures alone, I’ve created a 7 minute animated presentation that attempts to simplify the concept for non-engineers. For those who prefer the more traditional format, I have a detailed report on network management that goes in to far more depth than this presentation.
The first few slides are mostly text so you can skip ahead at your own pace. Also note that you can click the maximize button in the lower right hand corner to view the presentation at full screen. Please enjoy the presentation.
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[...] In addition to equitable bandwidth distribution, the network should prevent “queue starvation” for all applications and minimize the harmful effects of jitter. [...]
I found this presentation very enlightening and interesting as it did indeed answer quite a few questions I’ve had about networks for some time now. However I have a few more questions to ask based on this newly acquired knowledge.
Are there any modems around that help you do this, or are you proposing that modem makers build modems based on the high level policies that you’ve suggested in other articles that you have published on this site?
I ask this because I am interested in managing a home network (and it has please me very much so to find that your experiments were conducted on a residential connection because it shows how the layman is affected rather than the network engineer) and I’ve found that modem makers generally make it hard to change options in modems and it’s usually named differently from modem to modem and boggled down with jargon that most people find hard to understand. Moreover if it does get built-in with the modem manufacturing(via firmware or whatever) what would that leave for people with older modems(they’d be forced to purchase new ones if they want proper prioritization of networking, and most people would just go “your modem’s old, man, get a new one”) or users of emerging technologies(protocols, perhaps) that might get misclassified unless they can manually add said QoS options in those modems(the layman knows not of firmware upgrades, and most modem makers generally only provide firmware updates for their newer products. Worse still, they’re generally not easily accessible.)
p/s: If there is one issue that I have with this presentation however, it’s the volume. The irregular volume kinda detracts a little from the presentation, but that’s nothing major.
PSB,
Yeah, I’m sorry I had some equipment problems with the Microphone. I’ve got that fixed, so I may need to rerecord it.
Ideally, you need a router/modem combination device. My AT&T service gave me a Netopia 3347 router/modem which supports DiffServ QoS profiles that you can configure. This would fix the upstream jitter if you set all of your online gaming and VoIP traffic to Expedited Forwarding (EF) and give it about 190 Kbps upstream to handle both online gaming and VoIP. If all you need is VoIP, you don’t need more than 90 Kbps. Online gaming doesn’t need more than 100 Kbps. Of course, you need to set this as a percentage so if your broadband service measures 420 Kbps upstream, you’d have to set it to about 33% upstream. Web browsing doesn’t need much upstream so I’d put that under the Assured Forwarding (AF) class and set it to 33%, and then set BitTorrent or other P2P applications to the remaining bandwidth under Best Effort (BE). This doesn’t say that you’re locked into these ratios so if P2P is the only thing going, it will still get 100%.
Unfortunately, this does not deal with the downstream problem since the queue is on the DSLAM or CMTS which is at the DSL or Cable head-end side. This is why I am suggesting that ISPs should have a reasonable default profile. http://www.digitalsociety.org/2009/09/fcc-5th-principle-must-allow-for-reasonable-discrimination/. Note that if they reserve 250 Kbps for gaming and VoIP, it would only reserve around 10% of your downstream for a 3 Mbps DSL connection. Again if VoIP or gaming isn’t used, the bandwidth is still available for other applications.
Furthermore, the upstream DiffServ configuration is pretty complicated, so I’d prefer to see the ISP put in some reasonable defaults. If the user wants to tweak it, they can.
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