IP: Is it good enough for business traffic?

By Denise Pappalardo
Network World Internet Services Newsletter, 09/12/01

Recently Network World ran a story that talked about how the largest ISPs are not offering dedicated Internet access users much in terms of quality-of-service.

The article can be seen at: www.nwfusion.com/news/2001/0903carrier.html

The Internet has carried commercial traffic for many years now. Business services such as VPNs, while somewhat crude, have been available since 1997. But in order to get better-than-best effort, service users are restricted to buying specialized services, which cost more than dedicated Internet access and are often times still lacking.

For instance, today WorldCom has a service that offers users class-based queuing that's supported on a Lucent device deployed at a customer site. This technology allows user to divvy up their Internet bandwidth into chunks that can be dedicated to specific user groups, application or traffic type. While this is helpful it really only affects the access portion of a user's link.

Queuing is not supported throughout WorldCom's entire UUNET Internet backbone. Yes, the traffic is delivered, but every router on the network does not recognize the bandwidth queues each customer sets-up. This service offers more control over the local connection from the customer to the edge of WorldCom's network.

AT&T has a similar offering with its Enhanced MIS. This service also addresses the local portion of a user's connection, but uses Differentiated Services. Customers can set up traffic prioritization from their premise to the edge of AT&T's network. Diff-Serv is an Internet Engineering Task Force specification that describes how the type of service bits in the header of an IP packet can be tagged for traffic prioritization.

But again, AT&T's network does not recognize this prioritization beyond its edge switches.

And many of the service providers such as WorldCom and Cable & Wireless have Multi-protocol Label Switching (MPLS) in their backbones, but are using it for traffic engineering. MPLS, a pending IETF specification, allows the carriers to specify traffic flows, which eases traffic management and cuts down on congestion. But right now, providers are not using this technology to directly offer customers enhanced QoS offerings.

What do you expect from your ISP in terms of guaranteed QoS over your dedicated Internet access links? The level of service that the ISPs are offering today may be fine for customers that are strictly using these connections for Web surfing and e-mail communications. But for customers that are using the public Internet to support business traffic are likely disappointed.