You never know what you’re going to get, in their comment section. While reading a post about “net neutrality” at the popular geek/technology site just the other day, we came across an excellent description of QoS and explanation of how it fits into the current debate. It was written by a site regular under what we assume is a pseudonym, and we thought it was good enough to republish here in full:

I think a big issue is that the telecoms want to be able to charge more money for providing essentially a new service via the Internet: Quality of Service (QoS), which guarantees a certain bandwidth and delay (latency) between communicating parties. Up until now, the Internet has excelled at data transfer akin to FTP. In other words, whether your email delivery (or movie or software download) occurs in 5 milliseconds or 5 seconds, it doesn’t make that much of a difference. Whether the network drops some of your data, it doesn’t matter because the sender will retransmit, adding only milliseconds to the whole transfer. (As opposed to QoS, this is called “Best Effort”, as in the network makes a best effort to transfer your data, and if it fails, the sender will send again until the data reaches the destination.)

But long latency and dropped packets are VERY BAD for real-time communication such as 2-way voice conversations and live video. Providers of such service need a QoS guarantee, for example: Give me a bandwidth of 30 kilobits per second with a latency of 1 second or less for the next 10 minutes. The first part “30 kilobits per second” is peanuts given today’s broadband connections and fiber crisscrossing the nation. But the telco’s want to be able to provide the other guarantees of low latency and few dropped packets (”latency of 1 second or less for the next 10 minutes”) and charge extra for that capability. It seems legitimate as long as the “best effort” traffic is not impacted.

Couldn’t have said it better ourselves. The commenter also points out something the “net neutrality” crowd fails to acknowledge: That QoS-enabled Internet is in fact a different type of Internet service than the one most of us use every day. That costs a bit more than the regular type, sure, but why shouldn’t it? That’s just the market in action.