If This Had Been An Actual Emergency

saridder writes "In an increasing attempt to regulate the Internet like the current PSTN, the US Government has asked the IETF to come up with a system to prioritize government and emergency worker traffic in the event of another disaster, much like the GETS system already in place for the PSTN. It's interesting to follow, because it's only an RFC, so you don't have to follow it. I probably won't be prioritizing government traffic on any of my routers." The story has a link to the ieprep working group if you want to get involved or comment. Perhaps this is a better way than GOVNET.

Comments

Re:Some kind of flag?

[saridder]

You could with diffesrv right now (which is what this system will be based off of), but nobody would honor it.

Re:However . . .

[CrackElf]

I was able to get streaming video from bbc, but could not hit cnn's website, implying to me that the bottleneck was @ cnn, not with the infrastructure.

Re:Bravo to the gov on this one.

[Frank T. Lofaro Jr.]

You use whatever is handy (and working).

Wireless TCP/IP networks might be one of the last things left standing.

Also, TCP/IP networks with too many users will give slow service (until it gets so slow it breaks), whereas phones will completely block any calls above 100% load.

On the flip side, if you have a phone connection and the switches/lines aren't damaged and you aren't preempted (which GETS doesn't do, although it probably should *) you have a much more reliable connection than you would on a TCP/IP network.

*) If all circuits are busy, a GETS call won't get through until someone terminates one of their calls. Granted call terminations happen very often (whenever anyone on or through that switch hangs up) on a large switch - but it is still a delay.