[LINK] Australia Gets Broadband =?ISO-8859-1?B?liA=?=A S low Connection For A High Price

[Glen Turner]

In IP networks, "best effort" is a technical term meaning that
the latency and jitter of a connection is unbounded.

This is no bad thing, this assumption allows the packet-level
statistical multiplexing to make good use of expensive links.

Depending on the ISP, it may be possible to purchase other
services. Some ISPs offer services with bounded jitter for use
by Voice over IP and Video over IP. But this traffic makes
less efficient use of capacity -- that is, costs more to send.

We should not be promoting better than "best effort" services
as the typical ISP service. Most of the ISP's costs go into
offshore capacity provisioning. Decreasing the efficient use
of this will simply increase costs as a huge amount of this
capacity will need to sit idle to meet the service requirements.


Unfortunately, "best effort" also refers to the other things:
the robustness of the service (is it protected by redundant
resources), to service repairs, and to contract terms.

The original author of the media release should have been more
careful when using terms that may be confused with widely-used
industry jargon. They probably should have written "Telstra
expects users to occasionally experience network congestion
when using its 8Mbps ADSL service". To me, that's a hint that
Telstra have underprovisioned their network and that I should
buy fast ADSL elsewhere.