On Tue, 9 Jul 2002, Richard A Steenbergen wrote:
On Tue, Jul 09, 2002 at 11:51:08AM -0700, Toerless Eckert wrote:
FUD. What problem with billing models ? If you are an ISP, you are selling bandwidth. If another receiver joins the content , you get another piece of egress bandwidth filled up which hopefully is being paid for. If you need to cross-charge this back to the ingress-point, so do it. You just technically can't simply have accounting points on your exchange points anymore if you need to do so, you also need them on the delivery side of your network. More complex things than this have been done in the past. And of course, that could even be improved if demand for technology improvements was there (like eyeball count transmission via PIM).
How about as a service provider... How could you possibly bill someone for a packet if you have no idea how much of your network resources it will consume?
If I source a 1Mb/s stream my upstream can be assured that it will use no greater than 1Mb/s on each of their multicast transit links... that may require a different billing structure than unicast but it's easy to measure (netflow) or bill for... their internal network make look strange though.. if they have a full mesh (mess maybe) mpls network provisioned on top of their access circuits they may carry the same traffic more than once of the same link... such are the joys of tunnels.
Most people bill at the customers' port, as a receiver of multicast there are no issues, but as a sender I havn't seen anyone come up with a satisfactory way to charge for it.
-- -------------------------------------------------------------------------- Joel Jaeggli Academic User Services joelja@darkwing.uoregon.edu -- PGP Key Fingerprint: 1DE9 8FCA 51FB 4195 B42A 9C32 A30D 121E -- In Dr. Johnson's famous dictionary patriotism is defined as the last resort of the scoundrel. With all due respect to an enlightened but inferior lexicographer I beg to submit that it is the first. -- Ambrose Bierce, "The Devil's Dictionary"