On Fri, 21 Aug 1998, Bruce Hahne wrote:
I don't see that you've answered his question about value flow. You're describing how to set a value on a stream of packets without answering the question of who should pay. Should we charge the sender or the receiver?
Neither. We charge the peer whose traffic is incoming and who uses our transit resources, a.k.a. intercity links. The peer always has control over the traffic because they can route it differently if they choose or build network infrastructure to avoid excessive use of the other company's intercity links. We don't care about the peer's customers at all and have no idea what is in the data packets. They are just bitstreams flowing in both directions.
Back at the 1995 APRICOT conference there was a mention of an IETF WG (likely now dissolved) which was specifically working on the settlements issue, and their answer to this question was "it depends". For every packet you have to determine a packet owner who is responsible for paying. The owner could vary per application, per site, and/or per end user.
Much, much too complex. If the packet comes into my network, I note which peer it came from, what is it's destination address and how many bytes in the packet. At my leisure, I count the bytes and compare with outgoing bytes. If it exceeds a predetermined ratio of free balanced peering, I apply a selection algorithm to look at destination addresses and byte counts and calculate a transit value. This is what I bill. Of course, in the real world the collection of data and the billing would be audited or even performed by a 3rd party settlements council.
If I'm downloading a copy of sendmail, I'm probably the "owner" of those ftp packets
I don't care about you; you're just a customer. The peering relationship is strictly between the two backbone providers. -- Michael Dillon - Internet & ISP Consulting Memra Communications Inc. - E-mail: michael@memra.com Check the website for my Internet World articles - http://www.memra.com