Christian Huitema writes:

Paul,

You asked me to repeat that: if not the telephone system itself- would Christian prepare an analysis saying "a Internet of `appropriate` capacity with RSVP and IPng would allow for concurrent AUDIO (as Jon said) of phone quality for everybody ..." The only problem I have with this phrase is the mention of RSVP. I don't think there is actually any major problem for providing a best effort service dimensioned to fit the needs of 600Mio internauts (or 6 billions, for that matter). I am convinced that some policing will be needed to make sure that usage is proportionate to investments (and subscription rates). I am however definitely not convinced that RSVP is what we need there. RSVP is about giving special priviledges to a few flows; we need to provision sufficient resources so that the average flow has adequate capacity, which is a different problem.

And for audio applications, redundancy can be used in the encoding for the end result of packet loss tolerance without detectable quality degration. This does not account for variable delay though. Pete