{"id":618,"date":"2011-02-16T22:42:44","date_gmt":"2011-02-16T09:42:44","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/?p=618"},"modified":"2011-02-16T23:28:31","modified_gmt":"2011-02-16T10:28:31","slug":"the-future-of-isps-client-controlled-qos","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/the-future-of-isps-client-controlled-qos\/","title":{"rendered":"The future of ISPs &#8211; Client-controlled QoS"},"content":{"rendered":"<div class=\"8781ca4f97038dd0d58a1ad8af045721\" data-index=\"3\" style=\"float: none; margin:10px 0 10px 0; text-align:center;\">\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"><!--\r\ngoogle_ad_client = \"ca-pub-6411751809866006\";\r\n\/* BlogHorizontalSlim *\/\r\ngoogle_ad_slot = \"6442664612\";\r\ngoogle_ad_width = 468;\r\ngoogle_ad_height = 60;\r\n\/\/-->\r\n<\/script>\r\n<script type=\"text\/javascript\"\r\nsrc=\"http:\/\/pagead2.googlesyndication.com\/pagead\/show_ads.js\">\r\n<\/script>\n<\/div>\n<p><strong>Note:<\/strong> The terminology in this post has been relatively simplified to appeal to a broader audience<\/p>\n<p>I&#8217;ve mused about this before but I&#8217;m unsure if I ever blogged about it or in what depth.<\/p>\n<p>I alluded in a previous post, my prediction that ISPs are going to have to offer more than just pure broadband.<\/p>\n<p>All ISPs \u00c2\u00a0in New Zealand are going to be offering similar services in the future. There&#8217;s only so much that they can scrimp and save on margins.\u00c2\u00a0There&#8217;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.<\/p>\n<p>Customers want more than just a connection to the internet!<\/p>\n<p>It&#8217;s now got to be fast, it&#8217;s got to be cheap (Or cost-effective, but that&#8217;s all relative, so we won&#8217;t go there), it&#8217;s supposed to come with a free modem (Which I disagree with because they&#8217;re always hopeless ones that ISPs give out, which in turn causes more issues), and customers want a &#8220;value add&#8221;. They want something that makes them glad they&#8217;ve chosen their ISP over another.<\/p>\n<p>Vodafone offers a free upgrade to MySky HDi. Orcon has decided that TVNZ OnDemand won&#8217;t count towards your bandwidth. WorldXchange offer a free VFX VoIP line. Telecom have their Total Home packages with calling offers.<\/p>\n<p>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!<\/p>\n<p><!--more-->You see, as it stands, right now, you can do a lot on a crummy 2-4m\/bit ADSL2+ line.<\/p>\n<p>What&#8217;s the biggest problem that users face? Congestion at the exchange. However, this is being fixed rapidly with the Chorus rollout.<\/p>\n<p>So, our second biggest problem is line congestion, where you&#8217;re trying to push more information down your internet connection than it can handle.<\/p>\n<p>There&#8217;s two ways around this:<\/p>\n<p>1) Get a faster line. It could be fibre, it could be VDSL2, it could be HSNS. It could be you move house even.<\/p>\n<p>2) QoS what you currently have, so everything is effectively prioritized.<\/p>\n<p>Let me explain.<\/p>\n<p>QoS stands for Quality of Service. It&#8217;s simply a fancy name for prioritizing certain types of data, such as Skype, over others, such as sending email.<\/p>\n<p>Why would that be useful?<\/p>\n<p>Well, if you&#8217;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&#8217;ve all had it happen, and at the time it&#8217;s the most annoying thing in the world!<\/p>\n<p>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.<\/p>\n<p>What you can effectively do is &#8220;divvy up&#8221; your internet. Your ISP could give you a &#8220;Portal&#8221; or website where you can configure the kind of prioritization that goes on, for your home \/ office broadband connection.<\/p>\n<p>You could allocate the first 10% for Skype \/ VoIP, and a further 10% for gaming. They&#8217;re generally the things that need a constant flow of data. They need #1 priority.<\/p>\n<p>You could set aside 20% of your connection for Email, it doesn&#8217;t generally need much, and it doesn&#8217;t usually matter if an email takes 5 seconds to download vs 10 seconds.<\/p>\n<p>If you&#8217;re a business user, you might want to allocate off another 15-20% for &#8220;remote access&#8221; kinds of data, such as Remote Desktop \/ Citrix \/ VPNs.<\/p>\n<p>Then you could leave the rest for Web Browsing!<\/p>\n<p>Your ISP can help quite significantly, but you also need to be able to do that kind of prioritization from your own router.<\/p>\n<p>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!<\/p>\n<p>Granted it could be pretty complicated to take care of everything, every single game ever created, but a broad \/ general kind of setup shouldn&#8217;t be terribly difficult to get going.<\/p>\n<p>Having a value-add service like that is the kind of thing that ISP&#8217;s will begin offering in the future.<\/p>\n<p>Add that to having the likes of TVNZ OnDemand not count towards your data allowance, then throw in things like optional &#8220;family-safe&#8221; 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 &#8220;good&#8221; ISPs!<\/p>\n<p>Now all we need is an ISP in New Zealand to start offering that kind of service for home users, and I&#8217;d be over the moon!<\/p>\n<p>Have any thoughts about this idea? I&#8217;d love to hear them.<\/p>\n<p>Cheers<\/p>\n<p>Chill.<\/p>\n\n<div style=\"font-size: 0px; height: 0px; line-height: 0px; margin: 0; padding: 0; clear: both;\"><\/div>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>Note: The terminology in this post has been relatively simplified to appeal to a broader audience I&#8217;ve mused about this before but I&#8217;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. [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":3,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_publicize_message":"","jetpack_publicize_feature_enabled":true,"jetpack_social_post_already_shared":false,"jetpack_social_options":{"image_generator_settings":{"template":"highway","default_image_id":0,"font":"","enabled":false},"version":2},"jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[5],"tags":[11,12,23,30,302,303,143,144,304],"class_list":["post-618","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-personal-rantings","tag-adsl","tag-adsl2","tag-bandwidth","tag-broadband","tag-isp","tag-isps","tag-qos","tag-quality-of-service","tag-traffic-shaping"],"jetpack_publicize_connections":[],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/pWi3e-9Y","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/3"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=618"}],"version-history":[{"count":4,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":621,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/618\/revisions\/621"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=618"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=618"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"http:\/\/www.c2s.co.nz\/blog\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=618"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}