Hank Nussbacher <hank@ibm.net.il> wrote:

...

To be more precise it would have had merit if Internet metering was at least remotely technically feasible.

IBM Israel has been handling its leased line and Web sites with metering since day 1.

There seems to be a massive confusiuon here. What isn't feasible is end-to-end telco-style metering, which is what those articles all about. (Actually, anybody who ever made international calls knows that telcos also cannot do complete metering and simply ignore load on in-country circuits). Metering on customer access lines does not change economics of backbones at all (where all the real hard problems are). In other words, the access line metering is irrelevant to what is discussed. Generally speaking, at least 70% of users already have metered access of that kind (in form of per-hour connect time charges), so in this sense Internet is metered already, and was like that for years. Obviously that's not "metering" Metcalfe et al are calling for. (BTW, i know providers who do attempt to charge differently for local and international traffic by counting packets, but they have developed quite a lot of software and have the financial and legal framework to support it. The fact that they don't have anything faster than E-1 helps a lot, too.) --vadim