Re: The difference is not traffic priority....
Indeed. QoS is an issue, but that is seen at the customer's endpoint side so that his 10 year old kid doesn't hog all his DSL pipe with uTorrent uploading slowing down TCP ACK traffic.
Your ISP is selling bandwidth to you. If they can't serve it, they are lying in their service terms. They should upgrade their links, end of discussion. And this guy is obviously talking about "smart networks" because he sells the stuff that would do that, not because he actually believes all that crap.
In fact, the Bell phone system is the perfect analogy to the Internet. All in all, everything is simply packet routing from A to B, the main difference being that everything is packet switched instead of circuit switched which allows for far more traffic to go through a single wire. TCP/IP in particular basically builds up a virtual circuit between two endpoints, each side just sees a two-way stream of bytes that will always arrive in order. Connections are similar to phone calls, where instead of phone numbers you have IP+port numbers. Another good thing of using the phone analogy is that it shows the travesty that NAT is, especially "CGNAT" which is how some ISPs get to squeeze their users and save on money by using one single routeable IP to serve hundreds of subscribers. In a Bell phone analogy, you would have the phone company giving you a "outgoing calls only" phone but charging you the same as a "incoming and outgoing calls" phone!!!
Biting the hand that feeds IT
