Financially strapped Genuity Inc. last week introduced a quality-of-service (QoS) feature networkwide that allows customers to prioritize their Internet-bound traffic.
The ISP is using Differentiated Services and Weighted Fair Queuing (WFQ) to offer four classes of service to customers of its Internet Advantage dedicated Internet access. Customers determine how all of their applications and traffic are queued and prioritized over the ISP’s global network.
The four classes of service include voice over IP (VoIP), interactive data, real-time video and standard traffic. The highest level, VoIP, can only be used by Genuity customers that buy VoIP services directly from the ISP. Customers that are supporting their own VoIP applications would use the second-highest level of service, interactive data, to support their voice traffic. This class of service is also appropriate for transaction-oriented applications. Real-time video is designed to support videoconferencing, and the standard traffic class is for e-mail or HTTP traffic.
Customers with dedicated T-1s, T-3s or OC-3s can sign up for the service. They can expect to pay 10 percent more per month for the service.
While customers are charged more for the added feature, Genuity is not offering monitoring tools today that will allow customers to see in real-time how their traffic is being sent and delivered over the ISP’s network. Genuity says it expects to add such monitoring tool features by mid-2003.
There are also no service-level agreements that guarantee prioritization. The ISP’s standard performance SLAs apply, but there are no additional guarantees.