The IPHighway OPS system provides full support for both edge and core configuration policy control. This feature simplifies the management of current inventory, and eliminates the need for individual configurations of upgraded devices. This architecture has excellent scaling properties, and can virtually scale to any size network. In fact, it is hard to imagine a full size deployment of tiered services without a policy system, OPS or similar. Once tiered service has been established, customers would demand the next phase for achieving dynamic, on-demand QoS allocations.
Tiered service is a good start, but is only the beginning, as it is relatively limited.
Furthermore, it lacks the ability to adjust to the changing status of the network, or perform automated capacity planning and provisioning. In a sense, network administrators would still need to resort to the art of network provisioning manually. From the customer perspective, changes to service levels or traffic provisioning requires prolonged human negotiations with their ISP or IT manager. The policy system controls the traffic mapped to these Olympic classes by controlling the edge marking. This control is critical to assure that classes are not overpopulated, and the higher-priority services actually get better service.