Dan Bricklin has a great article about Why We Don’t Need QOS: Trains, Cars, and Internet Quality of Service.

He echo’s a lot of my thoughts about providing Voice over the Internet, something that Telco’s are notriously loathe to do, partly because they won’t cannibalize their own business, but partly because they just don’t get it.

If you’re someone who’s convinced that voice and video over the internet won’t happen untiol we have reliable QoS guarantees, read this. If, like me, you don’t like the telco way of thinking about net traffic and congestion, but you’ve lacked the words and analogies to say so, read this right now.

I keep reading how all sorts of applications for the Internet will require new, “Quality of Service” (QOS) features in order to work. There is this feeling that special handling of “the right traffic” will be required to make things work. I believe that there are some dangerous flaws in this type of thinking. Not only can QOS make the Internet worse for applications we need and depend upon, it won’t be able to help deliver on its promise. I also believe that while the need for QOS sounds intuitive at first, once you think about it a bit, you’ll see that common sense argues against it in the context of the Internet.