[*] 10Mbit speed

[John Lange]

On Wed, 2006-09-06 at 16:15 -0500, Kevin D Scott wrote:

> Well I was cut off, as expected, so I haven't tried the QOS enhancement yet.
> 
> Has anybody else here tried it?  Any results?  My biggest concern is that it
> doesn't help all VoIP traffic, just some to the bigger services, Vonage,
> Primus, ect.

My personal belief is that it does nothing. If you press Shaw hard (as I
did) to describe what kind of QOS they are using you ultimately will
discover that it does not exist in the telephony sense.

The final answer I got was that it actually stands for "Quality of
Signal" monitoring. This is some kind of real-time reporting system they
use to monitor your modem's performance.

Looking up QOS on Wikipedia finds that it has more than one meaning:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Quality_of_service

"Quality of Service (QoS) refers to the probability of the
telecommunication network meeting a given traffic contract"

According to the tech I spoke with at Shaw, that is the meaning of the
term they are using even though their web site clearly indicates that
QOS is packet prioritization.

Of course there are many different ways to do QOS, the one that would
make the most sense for Shaw to implement would be DiffServ.

"The second and currently accepted approach is "DiffServ" or
differentiated services. In the DiffServ model, packets are marked
according to the type of service they need."

But of course, if they were doing DiffServ, they would need to tell you
how to mark the packets so they get priority and that is what I was
calling them to find out.

The other option would be to put your entire modem on a IEEE 802.1q VLAN
and give it higher priority for _all_ traffic coming from your modem.

Actually, the current problems with Shaw gives me a unique opportunity
to test their QOS service so I think I will order it and see if it makes
any difference.

John