QoS and the M25
About a week ago, a few of us from work drove over to Le Mans and I was reminded once again of the Europeans and in my humble opinion their better quality of driving. Last weekend however, while driving back to my parents, I had to tackle the M25 and Saturday appeared to be one of those days when the 'less blessed with driving ability' were out on the road. Thus, this blog posting is two fold
- If you are one of those types that sits out in the middle lane, please take a quick look here and in particular section 117 here. RAC research discovered that up to a third of motorway capacity is being wasted by people driving inefficiently. Lane 2,3 etc are for overtaking, not for crusing.
- Traditional solutions to getting voice calls over a network have been to chuck more bandwidth at the issue and/or to reserving space on the network. Bandwidth and QoS is like putting more lanes on the motorway or designating specific lanes for specific types of vehicle. Although this tries to help the problem, what you should also is make the vehicle and driver more efficient so they use the road/network properly.
That's pretty much the view we have taken with Office Communication Server 2007, as discussed in the Psytechnics report. We don't assume QoS is in place and instead use some software trickery to make best use the bandwidth we have available. In an uncongested network we do as well as the competition, but if you add a bit of traffic to the network, we come out better than those that rely on QoS.