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[Simon M]

VoIP's in titanium, VPN is in gold, sorry if that wasn't clear. The positioning of VPN above email and FTP and browsing is something I can see being debated for a while. Traditionally I'd say email would be of higher importance that VPN, but things like the recent snow is showing that businesses are increasingly using VPN and other remote access, there's some graphs from Bob somewhere that show the increased amount of remote access traffic from when it snowed.

I've started a new thread with this quote, because the discussion that leads on from this is slightly off-topic to the original thread it comes from (Usenet priorities), although the two are related.

I though it would be worth gathering other people's thoughts on the traffic priorities they see as important on business accounts. I would definitely put VPN above most other protocols, but after VoIP & other real-time applications. Email I actually put quite low, so long as it never stops. I don't know about you, but I never sit & watch my email arriving - it just turns up in my Inbox & bleeps at me. It was different in the dial-up days, when I would have given it a higher priority. If I need to chat to someone back & forth, I use an IM client or pick up the phone.

The problem with VPN from an ISP's point of view is that it's just a wrapper. The whole spectrum of internet traffic can be going on inside it. I use it to become a WinTS client on a server & do everything from copying files locally (akin to an HTTP download, say) to running applications on the remote server. These aren't start & let run applications, they require constant user input, so speed is important. Fortunately, for this purpose, WinTS puts relatively little strain on the network link, as unlike standard Windows networking, it's a proper client-server application.

Remote desktop protocols of all types are all very speed critical. I use VNC a lot, or variants of it (TightVNC & UltraVNC mostly)& there are plenty of similar systems. Our current business model is built around these communications protocols being fast & available.

So my priorities are:

Voice over IP
Instant Messaging (text only  )
VNC & similar
VPN
web browse & download
email
probably something else I have forgotten
Usenet


What about the rest of you?

[dtomlinson]

I think my positioning of email was based on a Plan C major service outage scenario, in that if you could only ensure that one or two things worked a business would more than likely put email in there tradionally but as you say email is becoming less important and replaced by other means of communication, but least I think this is down to the volume of spam and the inherant security flaws within email. Excluding a batch of test emails I've sent about 10 emails this year so far, when I worked at Freeserve I'd probably send that many a day.

I can't remember whether I mentioned this in the post you quoted, but ultimately the aim of the traffic management is to give you the control of the priorities so you can choose what goes where and how you use your bandwidth.

[Simon M]

My point exactly, Dave. Email is a business critical service. It's not supposed to be real-time, so it doesn't need to be at the fastest speed. What it must do is continue to work, even if slowly, even if everything else packs up altogether. I'm talking about traffic flow now, not Plusnet's own email service. I suspect most people for whom email is business critical are not relying on Plusnet to manage their email mailboxes, but just to relay outgoing mail & provide the transport mechanism for incoming mail.

Spam is a pain, but the Adaptive Filter in Thunderbird's junk mail control copes pretty well. I still do deal with 10-15 genuine business emails daily.

If the days of 'everything just works all the time' are gone, then business users as well as the more technically minded residential users will benefit from the 'design your own' product. As has been pointed out elsewhere, it won't be for everyone, so a range of 'off the shelf' products will still be needed, or at least some sensible defaults. As a specialist brand within BT, Plusnet should no longer have any obligation to chase the 'I want everything for nothing & I don't want to have to think about it' market. BT is well setup to serve that market itself.

That last paragraph starts with a sweeping & rather sad assumption, but we have gone from a situation of spare network capacity (nationally, not just Plusnet), to one where the demand has risen to overtake the available capacity. I would guess that is likely to apply for at least the next 5-7 years, maybe longer.

[James]

When we've had connectivity problems, as a business we've been happy to connect every couple of hours to collect mails. Thats not something practical though for a homeworker who needs to have an active VPN tunnel for large chunks of the day.

I'd put VPN quite high on the list, with email coming much lower - as mention by the OP, so long as it doesn't stop, speed is less important.

[ianwild]

Bear in mind that given the very low volume email traffic consumes, where it sits in terms of affecting other protocols is not very significant at all. At this moment in time, email is using 40Mb/s, and HTTP is using 1.4Gb/s...

Ian

[Jaowon]

Does that http figure include RPC over HTTP :p