Dirk Harms-Merbitz <dirk@power.net> wrote:
The big problem is the current incentive to cripple network connections.
The incentive to reduce quality down to the minimal level accepted by the target customer base is the prominent feature of any market.
Why should it cost more to connect at 100MB/sec vs. 56KB/sec? If the same amount of packets are transfered? Why should I pay more beyond the one-time cost of buying interface electronics?
Because there is a real cost for long-haul packet transport. Why people pay higher rent for houses than for studio apartments? "Connection costs" is rent on transmission facilities, plus overhead (upkeep of the property, insurance, administration, etc).
Many real-time problems with packet switching (out of order arrival of packets, need to re-order packets) essentially go away when speed increases, i.e. things move out of perceptible ranges into in-perceptible time variations.
That does not parse. Internet as is does not reorder packets. Increasing speed does not change anything in this respect. It only shrinks time scale. And, i never suspected that reordering is a problem in real-time world. 0.5 sec variance (a lot!) with 1.5Mbps MPEG-2 video stream (better-than cable TV quality) requires stunning 100 kilobytes worth of buffers. The only reason reordering is a problem is because TCP has no reasonable selective ACKs (the existing SACK options are close to useless), so kludges like VJ's fast retransmit are necessary on high delay-bandwidth networks.
Settlement based on whoever takes more traffic would be nice.
Would you please describe any useful mechanism of traffic-based inter-backbone settelemts?
It gives a very direct incentive to build better networks.
Nah. It is like saying that "usage-based" pricing at McDonalds gives a very direct incentive to sell something better resembling food.
Lets say MAE's and NAP's are run in a cost-recovery mode and my only monthly cost as a network is the cost of my circuits, i.e. having a connection to the MAE/NAP.
They do it now.
As soon as my network takes more traffic than my circuit costs I'm making money.
I assume "my network takes more traffic" means "there are more packets (bytes, etc) going into my network", right? So, you want to charge others for your customers browsing their customer's servers?
Money that can be used directly to build a better network which will take even more traffic, i.e. generate more money. In a sense, this would provide best case capitalism with routers deciding from whom to buy.
I love it. Do you really think you discovered a fount of money? Any settlement game is zero-sum by definition. When ISP A pays ISP B some sum, A has less resources to invest into infrastructure. On average, customers do not win.
All energy would go into building better networks... neither advertising, nor salespeople are necessary in this scenario!
Ah, i'd like to live in that world of yours. --vadim