Prioritized Traffic: Maybe Not Such a Bad Thing

Last GOSN sighting for the week, I promise, but I had one more thought to share that came out of my experiences witnessing them set up a working model of their high bandwidth community video protection solution at the FTTH Conference.

I wrote a post on Tuesday about how GOSN's SafetyBlanket is a truly high bandwidth application, demanding up to 100Mbps of symmetrical access, and how at the Home Networking Zone they were gobbling up 27 out of the 30Mbps coming into and out of that faux building.

In talking with one of the IPTV providers who was having to try and squeeze into that remaining 3Mbps, he made a comment alluding to his surprise over why/how GOSN was able to take over the majority of the bandwidth on that network.

But later that day I overheard a GOSN salesman talking to a conference attendee and discussing how old school security captures the telephone line when it's set off. When a standard security system--sensors on doors and windows--goes off it takes over the telephone line in order to ensure the alarm monitoring center receives the alert. Though when this happens you lose your telephone service until the alarm is turned off.

While I can't confirm at this moment, I think that was some of what was happening with GOSN taking over most of the bandwith into the house. Simply put: they're a security product that needs priority access to the network in order to ensure their ability to effectively monitor homes through live and on-demand video.

And let's think about this for a moment: is it really such a bad thing for them to have priority access to the network over an IPTV signal? Should we treat that IPTV signal in the same exact way as a live video feed sent from a house being broken into on over to the local authorities?

For me, this episode really drove home the point that all Internet traffic is not created equal. Some applications demand more bandwidth, less latency, and/or the ability to prioritize their bits over something that's less important, like security over entertainment. And I see no reason why we shouldn't give them that access.