Port numbers and traffic data

[Ian Batten]

On 21 Apr 08, at 1926, James Firth wrote:
> contention ratios

It's not helped by the fact that operators tend to use the lowest  
common denominator of traffic shaping.   Some products will deliver  
much better experience under load, because they have deeper buffers  
and better global traffic shaping.  Other products are much cruder and  
tend to veer more towards policing than shaping: so far as I know,  
there's not much about shaping in typical tender documents and  
procurement processes.  This didn't matter a few years ago, when  
contention in the back haul was a myth used to justify poor  
interconnect: customers complained about performance and were told it  
was DSL (ie backhaul) contention, but it was actually more commonly  
peering.  These days backhaul contention is a real problem, and  
there's a lot of hard-drop policing going on.

ian