There is no doubt in my mind that, over the next year or possibly two, broadband service providers will begin offering service options based not only on bandwidth but on quality of service.

Though dreaded by the Net neutrality crowd, these so-called tiered services are inevitable in my mind because there is simply too much at stake in the broadband business to ignore the need to treat some traffic differently.

Suppliers to the service provider industry apparently agree. Witness the Alcatel-Lucent announcement today or the one from Zeugma last week, or the many different versions of service assurance and deep packet inspection products that are hitting the market.

What I still fail to understand is why there is such opposition to a tiered approach. No one screams when a broadband provider introduces a 10 Megabit per second service, even though that service costs more -- and even though it is very rarely 10 Mb/s, something Yankee Group analyst Vince Vittore aptly called The Big Bandwidth Lie.

Call them tollbooths on the Internet if you must, but if the current growth in the level of video and voice traffic is to be sustained, some quality of experience is required, and it isn’t going to be free.

E-mail me at cwilson3@telephonyonline.com.