Had an interesting debate today with a long standing ally in the Next Gen Access movement.

The discussion centred on whether CIR (Committed Information Rate) is relevant in a Next Gen World, or whether instead the capacity of eNdGAme FttH infrastructure is sufficient to allow effective QoS (Quality of Service) delivery for time-sensitive applications, eg. voice, video conferencing.

An interesting conclusion is the following truism:

“Given a fat enough pipe, all traffic is bursty”

On reflection CIR is evidence of the obsolete scarcity-from-abundance paradigm so beloved of the 20th Century Telco

- in the sense that the need for a commitment to deliver service is proportional to the risk of unavailability of said service…

If service quality interruption is derisked then no commitment is required.