Chilling_Silence's blogThe future of ISPs – Client-controlled QoS
Note: The terminology in this post has been relatively simplified to appeal to a broader audience
I’ve mused about this before but I’m unsure if I ever blogged about it or in what depth.
I alluded in a previous post, my prediction that ISPs are going to have to offer more than just pure broadband.
All ISPs  in New Zealand are going to be offering similar services in the future. There’s only so much that they can scrimp and save on margins. There’s always going to be some ISPs that offer better service or value-for-money than others. This takes things one step further, as a low-cost (To the ISP) value-add.
Customers want more than just a connection to the internet!
It’s now got to be fast, it’s got to be cheap (Or cost-effective, but that’s all relative, so we won’t go there), it’s supposed to come with a free modem (Which I disagree with because they’re always hopeless ones that ISPs give out, which in turn causes more issues), and customers want a “value add”. They want something that makes them glad they’ve chosen their ISP over another.
Vodafone offers a free upgrade to MySky HDi. Orcon has decided that TVNZ OnDemand won’t count towards your bandwidth. WorldXchange offer a free VFX VoIP line. Telecom have their Total Home packages with calling offers.
Let me expand on some of those value-adds, as well as why I think client-controlled QoS will be a real winner in the future!
You see, as it stands, right now, you can do a lot on a crummy 2-4m/bit ADSL2+ line.
What’s the biggest problem that users face? Congestion at the exchange. However, this is being fixed rapidly with the Chorus rollout.
So, our second biggest problem is line congestion, where you’re trying to push more information down your internet connection than it can handle.
There’s two ways around this:
1) Get a faster line. It could be fibre, it could be VDSL2, it could be HSNS. It could be you move house even.
2) QoS what you currently have, so everything is effectively prioritized.
Let me explain.
QoS stands for Quality of Service. It’s simply a fancy name for prioritizing certain types of data, such as Skype, over others, such as sending email.
Why would that be useful?
Well, if you’re video-chatting on Skype, the last thing that you want is for somebody else in your house to fire up a YouTube video and have that utilize your entire connection, making your Skype call fall to pieces. We’ve all had it happen, and at the time it’s the most annoying thing in the world!
In its simplest terms, what QoS will do is prioritize certain data types, such as Skype, so that it always has a percentage of your internet connection available.
What you can effectively do is “divvy up” your internet. Your ISP could give you a “Portal” or website where you can configure the kind of prioritization that goes on, for your home / office broadband connection.
You could allocate the first 10% for Skype / VoIP, and a further 10% for gaming. They’re generally the things that need a constant flow of data. They need #1 priority.
You could set aside 20% of your connection for Email, it doesn’t generally need much, and it doesn’t usually matter if an email takes 5 seconds to download vs 10 seconds.
If you’re a business user, you might want to allocate off another 15-20% for “remote access” kinds of data, such as Remote Desktop / Citrix / VPNs.
Then you could leave the rest for Web Browsing!
Your ISP can help quite significantly, but you also need to be able to do that kind of prioritization from your own router.
Having a setup like that would mean that you can be on a Skype and never have to worry about somebody firing up YouTube and killing your call. Same thing for your games!
Granted it could be pretty complicated to take care of everything, every single game ever created, but a broad / general kind of setup shouldn’t be terribly difficult to get going.
Having a value-add service like that is the kind of thing that ISP’s will begin offering in the future.
Add that to having the likes of TVNZ OnDemand not count towards your data allowance, then throw in things like optional “family-safe” filtering, transparent anti-virus, perhaps ISP-hosted game servers that you have better pings to, and you start getting a recipe for a great ISP that stands out from the regular “good” ISPs!
Now all we need is an ISP in New Zealand to start offering that kind of service for home users, and I’d be over the moon!
Have any thoughts about this idea? I’d love to hear them.
Cheers
Chill.
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