On Wed, 27 Aug 2003, Raymond, Steven wrote:
Have received complaints from usage-based-billing Internet customers lately about not wanting to pay for the nuisance traffic caused by worm-of-the-day. I believe that in the case of a short-duration, targeted attack that can be eventually be stopped, a billing credit is probably appropriate. But what about these current plagues that go on for weeks or forever- what is your network's response? Some simply want the traffic filtered in our routers- permanently. That is my least favorite option. Others want to simply not be billed for "bad" traffic. My reaction is to suggest that metered billing is probably not for you, then. But I could of course sympathize if I were footing the bill. What are other network operators doing about this issue, if it is an issue for them at all?
Well imho the simple way to look at this is that short bursts are generally swallowed up by the network and the upstreams and not charging is fine however for sustained traffic .. days or weeks or forever its different, if you didnt charge any customer for the increased bandwidth and load then you have to foot the cost of the network and equipment upgrades and that is surely wrong? I mean if the traffic were unrealistically to increase so that bad traffic was 50% of all traffic we would all have to double our circuit and router capacity and you either pass that cost on directly (charge for extra usage) or indirectly (increase the $ per Mb) to the user. I think you're right to say that if thats not acceptable to the user then usage based billing should be avoided for them but ultimately they will still incur the cost as you increase prices over time to foot the cost of increasing overheads. Steve