At 08:44 PM 09/21/1998 -0700, Chris Cappuccio wrote:
For everything that has been said about charging for bandwidth, I don't see why a simple, low priced per-gigabyte model doesn't work. If you want to go to the ironic side, try using free software to do it all... http://www2.empnet.com/ipacct/
For sake of simplicity, let's consider the case of _one_ global network which wants to charge its customers based on the some semblance of actual cost (i.e. ignore peering for the moment). Step one: hunt down all the marketing folks chanting "value-based pricing" and lock them in a empty colo facility. Step two: determine what underlying resources are most expensive (hint: check out your international circuits). Step three: set the unit price for each underlying resource so that current total usage of that resource times unit price would cover the current bill for the resource. Add in a small uplift to the unit prices to handle misc resources and margin. All of the above is easy... The hard part is when you somehow have to measure each customers traffic and determine their unit resource usage. Given the relatively discrepancy in local, national, and international circuits per Mbs/mile, you may need to categorize all of the flows into appropriate usage buckets. This gets non-trivial fast and diminishing returns approaches very quickly. Currently, most US providers simply lump the international traffic in with everything else and effectively sell "blended bits". Total traffic is easy to measure via SNMP, but most folks are referring to something more when the use the phrase "ip accounting". /John