Meet the demand

A good contact writes to remind us that Cisco is still struggling to impress the service provider/carrier market (still in the 'Others' category vs Alcatel, Ericsson, Nokia and the Chinese, according to Dresdner Kleinwort)
Cisco's latest marketing ploy is to put the frighteners on that carriers are testing deep packet inspection to see how much Skype or similar traffic is crossing their networks then degrading or blocking traffic types they disapprove of and "ruining service innovation on the Internet."
The flaw in this: Carriers don't want to stop traffic. Not a single one at Carriers World last week wanted to stop traffic (ok they are wholesale carriers, but they are the fastest growing business line in telco group operations). True, they all want to understand how to make more money - but either they get a better price or they partner with content providers etc and share in revenues. They all had the same answers to this question of traffic throttling, which was asked several times...
1. 'MySpace is adding 650k users a day - that's a city. As they move into a subscription model those users will demand QoS and we can charge for it.
2. 'Skype is at forefront of FMC, not Voda. We have to take a stake...
3. ' BitTorrent is an incredibly legitimate technology which will be widely adopted."
4. New apps are using the network. Good. They need more than standardised bandwidth."
These carriers have come to the right conclusion - manage your operating costs, not the traffic. ......
"It's not just about bandwidth it's about security, hosting and things like that."
"The challenge is to get your position. Plus you need to get your costs right."
"MySpace? Get a network able to cope with it. Meet the demand."