Michael Shields writes:
I think pricing based on the actual destination makeup of your traffic is more fair than pricing based on the assumption that your traffic is like everyone else's.
So, this is an issue of perceived morality and not a technical issue?
I think its only fair that everyone pay for the matchbooks they use. The fact that matchbooks are generally given away these days, instead of having people charged for them on a usage basis, is grossly unfair.
I think it is only fair that everyone pay for the television they watch on a metered basis. If you watch for ten hours, you should be paying twice as much as for five hours, right? Its only FAIR!!!!!
I think it is only fair that you should pay twice as much for a Fedex package going twice the distance, and I'm MAD THAT THEY DON'T CHARGE THAT WAY, DAMNIT!
Now that we've all figured out how silly this sounds... Mr. Shields, "Fair" has nothing to do with it.
What the hell kind of straw man is this? Yes, it sounds absolutely foolish, but you are attacking an argument I did not make. Perry, I am *not* a flake. I don't think that distance-insensitive pricing is immoral; or that it is going away; or that backbones should adopt it; or even that I know or care what sort of pricing models people have. All I said was that distance-sensitive pricing is feasible. What place it has in the market, if any, I don't know, and it is absolutely 100% pointless to argue about it. You think it has no place in the market, and I think it could be worthwhile for some niches. Neither of our opinions matter; the market will figure it out. I don't care to argue about it. It doesn't matter. The market will figure it out. By "fair" I don't mean "moral", I mean "pricing more accurately reflecting costs". I am sorry if you see this as a loaded term. In fact, "fair" is exactly the word used by connect.com.au, the first Australian ISP whose web page I looked at, to decribe their three- tiered pricing model -- intra-network, web cached, and external. This sounds to me like a coarse attempt at distance-sensitive pricing for an area of the world where bandwidth *is* a major cost. So, is it technically viable or not? I posted a method that I think will work, using existing netflow data, i.e. no significant extra router load. Is something wrong with it? -- Shields, CrossLink.