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Re: BBN/GTEI
by mark＠exodus.net 25 Aug '98

25 Aug '98

How about if everyone just joins the BPP? Mark -----Original Message----- From: Michael Dillon <michael(a)memra.com> To: nanog(a)merit.edu <nanog(a)merit.edu> Date: Friday, August 21, 1998 4:49 PM Subject: Re: BBN/GTEI |On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Dave Rand wrote: | |> Traffic is an obvious one. Is that measured in packets per second, or bits |> per second? | |Bits, not packets. And I think that aggregate octets per hour or per day |is a more reasonable way to measure it. | |> Since, in the USA (where the vast majority of traffic |> originates) circuits are provisioned as full duplex, _does it matter_ which |> direction the bits are flowing in? | |Yes. In and out should be measured separately. | |> Assuming it does matter, in which direction does the value flow? | |Here's the complex part. The value is not expressed in bits and it depends |on the destination within the peer's network. I am assuming that we can |map the IPv4 address space by city and that we can set some value to each |intercity link. This means that a stream of bits entering a peers network |in San Jose with a final destination in San Jose would be free. But if the |stream of bits was destined for Santa Cruz there would be a small cost. |And if it was destined for Sacramento there would be a somewhat larger |cost because Sacramento is further. | |> Another one is route-miles. A provider with 1,000 route-miles of circuits |> 'obviously' has less value than a provider with 10,000 route-miles of |> circuits. How does speed of those circuits factor in? Perhaps the metric |> should be DS0-route-miles (64K-circuits per mile). Of course, one WDM dark |> fiber run of 250 miles would nuke this metric. | |Route-miles between cities might be the metric for determining the cost |multiplier. Of course, this would assume some standard city-to-city |mileage and a standard boundary, rather like a LATA boundary, that would |make Santa Clara considered to be equivalent to a San Jose destination |since it is only a couple of miles from San Jose. | |> How about dollar value of the network, in total bills paid to the telcos? |> Does this mean that networks that are owned by telcos have an almost-zero |> cost, or an "full retail price" accounting cost? | |I think that we need some standard way to calculate such costs. Since we |are discussing how to account for regional transit I think that one way |would be for the peer who would receive the payment to publish to a |pricelist to their peers for city-to-city transit and use this pricelist. |The arrangement would give the peers the option to buy circuits from the |other peer at that rate. We would use some formula based upon how much |traffic a reasonably standard intercity circuit could carry to determine |the rate per bit over that link. | |> Are networks that |> have reciprical agreements with telcos unduely penalized, or do they |> benefit? | |I would expect that they would neither benefit or be penalized. | |> Another good metric might be number of customers. | |There is too much variation between customers for this to work. | |> How about number of network advertisments, or routes? | |Same thing, too much variation, i.e. big aggregates and little ones. | |> We haven't even got to the hard points, which is *how much* each of |> these metrics are 'worth'. | |Agreed. This is likely going to require an industry council to come up |with the metrics and algorithms and specific numbers. Does this sound |suspiciously like regulated peering? Yes. It is regulated peering but my |intention is for the providers to work out the regulations within the |industry and only have government involvement on a review basis. For |instance such a council would need to satisfy the government that it was |not acting in an antitrust fashion and they would likely review this on a |regular basis. | |> We also haven't begun to address sites like gatekeeper.dec.com, |> ftp.cdrom.com, and the like. Nor networks with plently of suck bandwidth |> (but not much content) such as MSN and AOL. | |I think that this suggestion addresses all sorts of asymmetry because I |believe that the bottom line is that it costs more to transfer a given |number of bits over a larger distance than a smaller one and that this |cost can be quantified. | |> It's harder than it looks on the surface, folks. Clues appreciated. | |I agree with this. However when I look ahead to a world in which the IP |network is the only data communications infrastructure carrying voice, |video, web, email, etc., then I think that the hard work must be done to |create a scalable peering system. If we succeed at this then we will never |have to go through the pain that the telephone network experienced with |the forced AT&T government regulated monopoly followed by its forced |dissolution still under government regulation. It is my opinion that the |only way out from the specter of increased government regulation of the |Internet is to pre-empt government action by working out a system that |would be considered fair under existing antitrust laws. If we can go a |significant way down the path to such a system, even if we have not yet |implemented it, then I believe we will be able to secure support from the |government for a self-regulated industry peering council. | |But that's just my opinion. I don't have all the answers. | |-- |Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting |Memra Communications Inc. - E-mail: michael(a)memra.com |Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com | |

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RE: GTE BBN - Rand originated BUSINESS MODEL discussion (fwd)
by Terence C. Giufre-Sweetser 25 Aug '98

25 Aug '98

On Sat, 22 Aug 1998, Mike Leber wrote: > It sounds like you are proposing settlements based on subtracting received > from transmitted (or dialup provider pays, web hosting company earns). // snipped heavily... Hang on, the main revenue stream for a dialup isp is always user's subscriptions and fees. A good web site makes money from plain old adverts. What are we selling here? A network access product? Or bytes of useful stuff? Network access implies we're selling the use of the pipes, and big content providers pay big money to get their content into that network, the same way you pay for a pipe running off the best connected network, and users pay dailup subscriptions to have their 33 to 56 kbps. Bytes? We're buying the stuff IN the pipes, the network no longer matters, it's just a way of getting bytes here and there, run it only for the sake of getting bytes pushed. Now, do you pay for bytes to be sent, or do you pay for bytes to be received? Well, it's mostly consumer based, so the receiver pays. Imagine if the US postal service are just like a byte payer internet. You walk down to the post office and mail your letter, it gets handled by many people (routers) and sorting systems (more routers) and crosses through quite a few different companies, (as it's the internet, no one entity owns all of the net,) and these companies all take a fee for their service, so, you pay 40c for the stamp and that 40c is whittled down to nothing by the time the final destination is reached. Now, that may work well, but the model ignores Quality of Service, and the capacity to carry lots of mail in special heavy use periods. The profitability of the service is suspect, because a competitor may come out with a 35c service and lay your service (network) idle and unprofitable. Service between particular points may be suspect, however these flows of mail are moved to the bigger mail handlers, making the marketplace heavily stratified, with anti-competitive practices of the big mail handlers forcing the little guys to use them as go-betweens. So, in total ignorance of mail flows (network topology) the market suffers bloated pricing due to stratification of the operators, no guarantee of mail arriving on time (there's no bandwidth guarantee) and of course, political fighting between mail handlers over who should be a customer paying for delivery and who should be taking the biggest cut of the 40c or 35c. Look at the carrier/courier market and you have this right now. People are making money, some are going broke, and common carriers are making life difficult for smaller operations and regional operators. The analogy falls apart when you realise that the US postal service and DHL et al do not really care what they cart, they'll deliver empty boxes if you pay them, and so, the whole point is that no one really knows how much real "bandwidth" is there out, whether or not you get to use it, and of course, no one really cares what you're shipping... TERRY

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Re: Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste (was Re: BBN/GTEI) (fwd)
by Terence C. Giufre-Sweetser 25 Aug '98

25 Aug '98

> Already being looked into and implemented. > Adrian, finding it mildly entertaining that AU is screaming for a more US-like > internet setup, and how the US seem to be after what AU have already been and > done. The #2 problem is the data pipe price we pay here in the land of .AU The #1 problem is the telco's are fixated on selling what's in the pipes and not the "promise to fill them up on demand." What's a typical same exch T1? US$150 per month? In .AU, same exch E1 is AUD1290 per month, or US$725/month. That's a factor 4.8, and data "consumption" gets worse. 19c/Meg for data, when the US transit is costing <1c/Meg. A factor of 20? Yeah... The funny thing is, Telstra (previously a monoploy carrier/clec,) sold IP transit on a fixed price pipe. Then discarded the model, for the pay per byte model. Many ISP's found their transit bills tripled overnight, and some "wholesalers" went through two or three price changes upwards of 200% per change. What did Telstra do then? They ran their network really lean, allowed oversubscription of 300% in some locations, but hey, you only pay for the bytes right? So, the internet product is running low on profit, pump up the network a little and watch everyone's bills go up... So, how many NSP/ISP's in North America would write MCI a blank check at the end of the month and not know if they're getting every piece of bandwidth they require? TERRY | Terence C. Giufre-Sweetser | 24x7 LINKS : AusBONE | | TereDonn Computer Engineering | ISDN/DDS/PAPL/HDSL/UWAVE | | PO BOX 1054, Spring Hill, QLD 4004 | Phone +61-[0]7-32369366 | | terry(a)tdce.com.au | FAX +61-[0]7-32369930 | | http://www.tdce.com.au | Mobile +61-[0]414-663053 | There is something fascinating about science. One gets such wholesale returns of conjecture out of such a trifling investment of fact. -- Mark Twain

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Re: Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement
by owen＠DeLong.SJ.CA.US 25 Aug '98

25 Aug '98

> At 12:12 PM 08/24/1998 -0700, Owen DeLong wrote: > >... > >To some extent that's true. However, as a counter-point, consider such > >sites as sunsite, wustl, smc.vnet.net, etc. I doubt those sites would > >continue to exist in a solely bandwidth sensitive pay-as-you-go world. > >I think they count on flat rate connectivity to be able to continue > >to exist. I don't think the elimination of those sites (and many others > >like them) would benefit the net. Do you? > > I'm not certain that they represent a true public service, as opposed > to simply interesting content. Interesting content can probably pay its > own way, even at retail prices. For example, the incremental cost to > send 10MB of data is only about 50 cents using normal retail rates [1]. > Are you saying that whatever you're downloading isn't worth paying that? > (or watching the appropriate number of web ads, as I currently do to > download palm pilot apps, pc freeware, and today's weather gif?) > > /John > > [1] Retail T1 transit from major backbone, fully utilized, $2400 monthly, > presuming cost recovery over 4 peak hours of 20 business days = $30 > per peak hour; each hour good for about 600 MB -> 5 cents / MB ) > Although I wouldn't mind paying for it, I think that the sites that are doing much of that wouldn't find it worth the effort to collect the money from all the users that are downloading. At that point, they'd simply fold up shop and go away. That's my concern. Owen

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Re: Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement
by John Curran 25 Aug '98

25 Aug '98

At 10:05 PM 08/24/1998 -0500, Tracy J. Snell wrote: >Everytime we have been SMURFed BBN/GTEI has been unwilling to do anything >to help us. Either filters or aiding in hunting down the SMURFer. My >experience is BBN doesn't help it's customers trace down SMURFers. Strange... I see tickets opened and worked on for these events; it's certainly the case that we work them when notified. If you forward me email from the last time this happened, I can hunt down the confusion. /John

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Re: Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement
by John Curran 25 Aug '98

25 Aug '98

At 04:14 PM 08/24/1998 -0700, Patrick Greenwell wrote: >The net effect is that the transit provider is double-dipping, >and it costs the receiver twice to receive the data. > >Somehow this doesn't seem to be very attractive to me. You're paying half the cost currently, the sender (presuming they're transit or a relatively balanced peer) is paying the other half. /John

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Re: Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement
by owen＠DeLong.SJ.CA.US 25 Aug '98

25 Aug '98

> p.s. The fact that the sender of traffic should be paying some portion > of the resulting costs is not a surprise to anyone; many of the > content companies that I've spoken to believe they already are > paying more as traffic increases, and were quite surprised to > find that it doesn't actually make it to the networks which > bear the brunt of the traffic carriage. > > p.p.s. As noted, departure from shortest-exit is also another approach > which may provide some answers to this situation, but that's a > different topic which deserves its own thread. This message > is simply noting that settling for peering traffic is quite > viable, despite assertions to the contrary regarding traffic > generation. As long as you're billing the senders on your > network for increased usage (and handing it off shortest-exit), > increased traffic is good thing. > Except, John, that you ignore the fact that you have basically required anyone who wants to put a high-bandwidth server on your network to accept other people writing a blank check for them, regardless of the legitimacy of the hits they receive. I doubt the customer would be too happy if your peering policy suddenly tripled their bill. Owen

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Re: Generation of traffic in "settled" peering arrangement
by Paul Vixie 25 Aug '98

25 Aug '98

> Are you saying that someone should be forced to pay for the privilege of > offering something for free to your customers? Things that your customers, > who I number among are requesting? I don't know what he was saying, but I'll say something like it: gatekeeper, wuarchive, cdrom.com, and other archives of free stuff are going to have to do some kind of micropayment scheme -- charge for downloads in other words -- in order to pay their own costs to their providers, in order that those providers are able to pay THEIR costs, in transit they buy or in glass they lease or whatever. The Internet backbone's growth has been all about barriers to entry and in special deals. People have been buying their provisioning at flat rate or with other subsidies, and reselling it at variable rates to folks who came later or otherwise didn't have access to, or knowledge of, the special deals of the pioneers. Eventually these special deals run out of time, or run out of bandwidth, and a true (cost-driven) market economy is developing. What we're seeing now is just SO inevitable. -- Paul Vixie La Honda, CA "Many NANOG members have been around <paul(a)vix.com> longer than most." --Jim Fleming pacbell!vixie!paul (An H.323 GateKeeper for the IPv8 Network)

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Re: Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste (was Re: B
by Sean Butler 24 Aug '98

24 Aug '98

Mike Leber wrote: >You appear to be missing the point that there are perfect legitimate and >non fraudulent ways of increasing the amount of traffic generated. For >example, simply pay all your web hosting clients based on the amount of >traffic generated. Then instruct them on ways to maximize their revenue >using methods that don't overly annoy users. For example: > >1) implement anticaching measures (both antibrowser cache and anti >transparent proxy cache) > >2) make their pages automatically reload every minute to show some dynamic >indicator (say, the temperature and humiditty outside). > >3) use lots of very long streaming data. They should have sound on every >page (and the sound files should be 3 weeks of data). That way if >somebody visits your client's site and then goes to lunch or home for the >weekend the web site is still generating revenue by playing this huge >sound file because the visitor's browser was left viewing your client's >nice site. My argument was that in addition to the peering settlement charges, each network would charge their customers for the traffic they generate. So, if you ask your web hosting customers to add traffic, and actually pay them for that, then my customers that request content from yours get a bigger bill than they used to. My customers stop going to your customers site. (I'll provide them with an itemized bill that lets them see what cost so much and why.) Your customers figure out they are getting a free internet connection from you (since you are now subsidizing their connection/traffic cost), but they are no longer getting any business from their customers. I imagine they take off the extra traffic real quick. And the numbers I am talking about would be quite small. Enough for the average dial user to retain a bill that is near $20/month. However, for those that generate much more, they'd get billed more. Now at the peering points, when you have thousands of dial in users requesting content, and you are on the short end of the traffic exchange in terms of byte count, so you'll have to pay the large content ISP, you can pass that on to your many dial customers. It would be similar on the content size -- you can charge based on the traffic they generate, but most likley, this will be a small small amount, since you be getting money from your peers. Again, this requires all ISP's to do per usage based fees -- not just one or two ISPs could start to do it, or they'd lose all their customers. I'm not saying to use the current flat rate costs *and* charge for usage, but lower the flat rate (or make it nothing or next to nothing) and then charge for usage. Shouldn't those users that generate the most traffic on your network pay for it? For number 3, if you are paying for traffic you receive, you no longer get up and go to lunch with your internet connection running! One thing I hadn't thought about, that your post brought out... If I cache, I am charging my customers for traffic they request, even though I only had to pay for it once... Not sure that passes the ethics committee. I know settlement based peering and usage based charges for your customers is not without many problems, but I think they can be worked out. I think settlements without usage based charges has no chance, as traffic generators can then run free. But when someone is paying for the traffic, bogus traffic would stop. There may be some period of instability as all Internet customers get used to it, but I think it could come around. And it is my take that you can catch non-legit traffic, and if the penalties for creating such traffic are high enough, it would happen infrequently. I know others feel that you can always generate bogus traffic that is not tractable, but if the technology is not there today, it is not far away. Sean ___________________________________ Sean Butler, CCIE #3897 IBM Global Services -- OpenNet Support Phone: 8-631-9809, 813-523-7353 Fax: 8-427-5475 813-878-5475 Internet email: sebutler(a)us.ibm.com

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Re: Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste (was Re: B
by Sean Butler 24 Aug '98

24 Aug '98

>> Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste I think everyone agrees that the above statement is true in today's Internet model, where customers are charged flat rates for their connections. But if we change the peering model, why should we not change the model for charging customers? If we do that, then settlements can work, and the problem of metrics for how to charge should become much easier... Take the aggregate traffic from A --> B, and from B--> A, and whoever receives more bits pays the other provider. Say it is A that has to pay B, as B is a big content provider and A is a big dial ISP. Now, if A charges $19.95/month flat rate to all of its dial users, A instantly loses. But if A charges its dial customers based on the bits received, or time connected, perhaps it becomes more even. Network A can't win in a settlement based peering relationship unless he passes the costs on to his customers, and at flat-rates, whether it is dial up or leased line, that is not happening. So, charge the content provider for outbound *and* inbound traffic. This can and should be subsidized by advertisers, as the more 'hits' that site generates, the more $$ you can charge. (Of course, this only works when advertisers are willing to pay to be on your site, but if they aren't willing, either your site has content that doesn't have mass appeal or the advertiser doesn't want to be associated with your content. For the former, you probably aren't getting enough hits to worry about usage based costs. For the latter, find another advertiser or someone else to pay...) For the dialup user, charge him a lower fixed monthly cost of, say $5, but charge him for the traffic to and from him. What's the cost? Whatever it takes to make money while remaining competitive! There are still problems with DOS based attacks, but those need to be resolved anyway. As for writing 'fraudulant apps' that generate asymmetric flows to try to 'even out' the peering relationship, it doesn't work anymore for creating flow in to your own network. Your paying the other provider because they are sending you more traffic than you are sending them. For the opposite direction, if you can write an app that sends more traffic out to the other network, you'll need a valid host to talk to. I'm sure the other provider won't have one of their own machines doing that, so you'll need a customer of the other network to receive that traffic. But now that they are charged for it, that won't happen. (I'm sure someone out there can think of ways around this, but I imagine there are solutions to them. If its fraudulent traffic, and you face serious fines and/or periods of time where you have to shut down your network, would you really take the chance?) Of course, the first ISP that starts to do usage-based charges may stand a good chance of losing many of their customers, so this would have to be Industry wide. And the peering charges would have to be the same (or at least on the same order of magnitude) between all ISPs, or peering imbalances will quickly be created. Thus, there will most likely have to be, at a minimum, an Independent Peering Council, or at worst, government regulation, to make this happen. :-( DISCLAIMER: I'm not advocating this solution, and it may or may not express the views of my employer. I should also state that I am doing my M.S. Thesis on "The Evolution of Peering." Any original ideas I see on nanog (or com-priv, where this discussion really should be) will be quoted as such! Sean ___________________________________ Sean Butler, CCIE #3897 IBM Global Services -- OpenNet Support Phone: 8-631-9809, 813-523-7353 Fax: 8-427-5475 813-878-5475 Internet email: sebutler(a)us.ibm.com

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