Thursday, December 19, 2002

Death of Abundance As I mentioned, Glenn Fleishman and Bob Frankston are having an interesting discussion on QoS. Let me lob in a perspective: The capital markets will never accept a solution of abundance for QoS.  Regardless of how one might explain that excess capacity is necessary to achieve quality of service, any carrier that portends excess will be smacked for creating a bandwidth glut.  Abundance is risk. There can be numerous tiers of service.  One of the common criticisms of QoS is that there are wide variants of quality and translating these into service level agreements would result in an impractical diversity of contract structures.  But other commodities, after standardizing other contractual terms have diverse tiers of quality.  West Texas Intermediate Crude (WTI), the most liquid natural gas contract, has over 100 grades of quality. Defining and agreeing to quality pays.  Beyond customers paying a premium for quality, QoS and SLAs determine fungible goods and enable risk management.  If David Isenberg is right, that carriers must move to become commodity providers of utility service, I would suggest that the value they can create is in: Reducing the operational risk of their customers through SLAs Reducing the market risk of their customers through contracts Standardizing inter-carrier SLAs and transactions Enhancing their systems to compete on their ability to rapidly provision for diverse edge requirements at a high volume Providing as much control to the customer as possible This is less of a technologist than a marketeer's perspective, but I believe what's missing is the practicality of what carriers will adopt and be valued for. 9:20:42 AM    comment []

© Copyright 2002 Ross Mayfield. Last update: 12/21/2002; 10:05:25 PM. This theme is based on the SoundWaves (blue) Manila theme.