Best-effort: Weakness or strength?

There's an absolutely fascinating dynamic in play right now — one that without a doubt will determine the shape of the industry for years to come. It boils down to this: Is so-called “best-effort,” Web-style service delivery a feature or a glitch?

Is it something customers put up with, or is it a fundamental characteristic of today's — and tomorrow's — successful network-based services? Can incumbent service providers — with their legacy five-nines networks and next-generation platforms driven by quality of service (QOS) and bandwidth reservation — change user expectations about network services, replacing in customers' minds concepts such as “limits” and “caps” with ideas such as “quality” and “guarantees”?

These are the fundamental questions facing service providers today. An example or two will help make this clearer.

From the telecom side, consider the current hubbub around peer-to-peer usage. For most ISPs, a few users taking advantage of a handful of applications over a limited number of protocols account for the lion's share of network bandwidth. Such users won't stand for peak-time limits or monthly usage caps, and above all they don't want their “behavior” singled out for special treatment by the network. They are fine with competing with other users for bandwidth, even if it slows their application — not to mention everyone else's. It's Net neutrality turned into a twisted game of bandwidth survival of the fittest.

From the Web side, an example of the best-effort dynamic can be seen in the tale of micropublishing service Twitter. Twitter lets users publish short (160-character) messages that get sent to everyone who subscribes to them. When a popular topic (such as last week's iPhone launch) hits the Twitter-verse or a popular user (uber-Twitterer Robert Scoble) sends out a message, the group multiplier effect often grounds Twitter to a halt. Still, Twitter keeps growing. Why do customers accept Twitter's obvious failings? What user psychology is at play here, and what does it say about which next-generation services will win and why?

Right now the dynamics around best-effort service delivery and customer expectations are getting the best of incumbent service providers. Customers — at least some of them, and vocal ones at that — seem to prefer cheap, easily accessible and just-good-enough services to slightly more expensive, quality-guaranteed services with reasonable usage limits.

So what's the answer? As service providers roll out new higher-bandwidth, smarter, more QOS-capable network services, the conversation with customers needs to change from “you used too much bandwidth, now you will be punished with overage fees” to “you need more bandwidth, and we're happy to reserve it for you for a few pennies on the dollar.” Super-users need to be recognized and appreciated and, yes, charged a bit more. But they also should be rewarded with a higher level of service.

That's nothing like this conversation happening between service providers and their customers today, particularly on the consumer side. But it's the way — the only way — to beat the best-effort players at their own game.