IP Convergence: Beyond VoIP, Beyond Cost Savings

QoS on the Internet, especially across service provider boundaries, is definitely in the realm of net neutrality.

In this case, however, the QoS changes I am referring to apply mainly to our IP-VPN product, which is our only product at the moment that requires the customer to buy bandwidth by class. All Internet traffic is automatically placed into the lowest class on the core, but in general does not support QoS at this time.

Because it is pretty hard to do QoS across provider boundaries, if we ever were to implement QoS on our Internet product, it would most likely be to enable higher classes of service to the applications we offer, like VoIP and Video Conferencing. We wouldn't give that higher class of service to customers, they would have to pay for it, but it would give them a lot more control over the priority of applications on their local loop, which is where they need it the most.

QoS on our core doesn't kick in except in the rarest of circumtances, say a bad fiber cut. We engineer it to deliver a high quality service, even on the lowest class.