On Fri, Dec 18, 2009 at 1:24 PM, Jonny Martin <jonny@pch.net> wrote:
On Dec 19, 2009, at 1:47 AM, Fred Baker wrote: .. modified if need be - to achieve this. Mixing billing with the reachability information signalled through BGP just doesn't seem like a good idea.
Indeed not.. but it might offer one advantage, if it was mandatory for any such tarrif/cost to be advertised there to be valid, and in the form of an ancillary BGP route attribute, rather than buried in some 500,000 page treaty that forces all ISPs to decipher it and try to figure out what their liabilities are. Mainly because it makes any tarrif very visible, and easily understood. and offers an easy ability to automatically make decisions like discard reachability information that has any billing labels or "strings" attached to it, or has a cost greater than $X per million packets listed for 'source'... and easily allows an ISP to replace the next hop with null when a tarrif option has been listed, or use only a route not subject to tarrif. Thus treating as unroutable or permit routing around any transit that would like to try to taint its routes by indicating tarrif to peers. And thus also permitting the whole notion of 'IP tarrif' to see a very quick death... Otherwise, new router hardware could more easily provide suitable counters and IPFIX data (with suitable changes to ip flow export formats) to track the tarrifs due to all "tarrif payee IDs", or whatever that would be. -- -J