In article <19980528101417.10618@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us>, "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@scfn.thpl.lib.fl.us> wrote:
On Thu, May 28, 1998 at 03:19:26AM +0000, Michael Shields wrote: [...]
Probably it will never make market sense to have distance-sensitive traffic pricing for "low-speed" users, where the cost of providing the service is mostly the cost of tech support, billing, dialin or xDSL aggregation, &c., and bandwidth is a small proportion of the cost.
With current trends, will the actual bandwidth _ever_ be more than a small fraction of the cost?
Despite preductions, very few resources have ever actually become "too cheap to meter". Can you back up your comment about metering requiring three times the current CPU capacity of routers? -- Shields, CrossLink.
Michael Shields writes:
Despite preductions, very few resources have ever actually become "too cheap to meter".
Television? Local phone service in many places? Matchbooks? Sewer service?
Can you back up your comment about metering requiring three times the current CPU capacity of routers?
It wasn't my comment, but I'll point out that routers are NOT in general built for this task. Indeed, getting them to do what they were built for is usually hard enough... Perry
On Fri, 29 May 1998, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Michael Shields writes:
Despite preductions, very few resources have ever actually become "too cheap to meter".
Television?
A broadcast medium with no mechanism for measurement without additional hardware. There are also pay-per-view events which are certainly metered.
Local phone service in many places?
And the phone company most definitely wants you to switch to metered local service. That's why they offer additional calling areas for people that switch to area calling. The stumbling block is that traditionally it was unmetered because the old switches had no mechanism to measure it.
Matchbooks?
If i go to Walmart to get matches, they are most definitely metered. Just because some places give them away for promotion doesn't mean they are free any more than caps and T-shirts are free.
Sewer service?
Don't know where you are from, but I pay for sewage based on consumption. They don't measure the sewage, but assume it is proportional to water usage. John Tamplin Traveller Information Services jat@Traveller.COM 2104 West Ferry Way 205/883-4233x7007 Huntsville, AL 35801
"John A. Tamplin" writes:
On Fri, 29 May 1998, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Michael Shields writes:
Despite preductions, very few resources have ever actually become "too cheap to meter".
Television?
A broadcast medium with no mechanism for measurement without additional hardware.
They *could* measure on cable. They don't. Ever wonder why?
Local phone service in many places?
And the phone company most definitely wants you to switch to metered local service.
They've *reintroduced* flat rate service in NYC.
Matchbooks?
If i go to Walmart to get matches, they are most definitely metered.
Yeah, but no one bothers to buy them that way. I'll point out, btw, that matches were once extremely expensive.
Just because some places give them away for promotion doesn't mean they are free any more than caps and T-shirts are free.
Caps and T-Shirts are effectively free if you take them with advertising.
Sewer service?
Don't know where you are from, but I pay for sewage based on consumption.
I don't. I think you are missing the point, though. There is no good long term reason for metered internet usage at the end user level, and there is also considerable market pressure against it. Perry
In article <199805291432.KAA29721@jekyll.piermont.com>, Perry E. Metzger <perry@piermont.com> wrote:
There is no good long term reason for metered internet usage at the end user level, and there is also considerable market pressure against it.
OK, NANOG means North American ... etc, but do you have _any_ idea what connectivity _to_ the US costs? "The" internet backbone has traditionally been the USA. So foreigners payed for a line to connect to the US and the US got connectivity to Europe, Japan etc basically for free. But that is changing. So for high speed access to destinations outside a country one would need to meter that. With 28k8 access, there's no real need, but once an end user gets the possibility to use his 2Mbit/sec ADSL line to download at full speed from, say, Europe, you're looking at a different picture. Mike. -- Miquel van Smoorenburg | Our vision is to speed up time, miquels@cistron.nl | eventually eliminating it.
On Fri, May 29, 1998 at 09:23:34AM -0500, John A. Tamplin wrote:
On Fri, 29 May 1998, Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Michael Shields writes:
Despite preductions, very few resources have ever actually become "too cheap to meter". Television?
A broadcast medium with no mechanism for measurement without additional hardware. There are also pay-per-view events which are certainly metered.
Cable TV is unmetered, although pay. You may pay premiums for tiers, but it's worthy of note in our context here that Pay per View does in fact require a significant inventment in smarter hardware on the part of the cable provider.
And the phone company most definitely wants you to switch to metered local service. That's why they offer additional calling areas for people that switch to area calling. The stumbling block is that traditionally it was unmetered because the old switches had no mechanism to measure it.
Not quite true. It has been the case for years that local switches could measure this if the LEC wanted to. It really does cost money to keep track, _and fight the arguments over minutiae that it engenders_.
Sewer service?
Don't know where you are from, but I pay for sewage based on consumption. They don't measure the sewage, but assume it is proportional to water usage.
Yeah, that's roughly how they do it here too. But this is a John Levine question... :-) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Member of the Technical Staff Unsolicited Commercial Emailers Sued The Suncoast Freenet "Two words: Darth Doogie." -- Jason Colby, Tampa Bay, Florida on alt.fan.heinlein +1 813 790 7592 Managing Editor, Top Of The Key sports e-zine ------------ http://www.totk.com
Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Michael Shields writes:
Despite preductions, very few resources have ever actually become "too cheap to meter".
Television?
I assume you are refering to over the air broadcast service. You pay for every kilowatt and employee salary by buying the products that advertise on the station. Billions of dollars go into the pockets of TV/Radio stations, advertising agencies, and power companies and it comes out of the profits of soda companies, pimple cream and car dealerships. There is no free lunch. Tim -- Snail: Tim Pozar / LNS / 1978 45th Ave / San Francisco CA 94116 / USA POTS: +1 415 665 3790 Radio: KC6GNJ / KAE6247 "It's a damn poor mind that can only think of one way to spell a word." - Andrew Jackson "What is wanted is not the will to believe, but the will to find out, which is the exact opposite." -- Bertrand Russell
Tim Pozar writes:
Perry E. Metzger wrote:
Michael Shields writes:
Despite preductions, very few resources have ever actually become "too cheap to meter".
Television?
I assume you are refering to over the air broadcast service. You pay for every kilowatt and employee salary by buying the products that advertise on the station.
Naturally. That is not the point, however. The point was that no one bothers to meter the service -- it is paid for in other ways. Anyway, this discussion has been taken way too far. Mr. Shields believes that distance based packet accounting is "fair" and that it is somehow going to happen. I believe that it is unlikely in the extreme. Time will tell which of us is right. Perry
Michael Shields wrote:
Perry E. Metzinger wrote ...
Can you back up your comment about metering requiring three times the current CPU capacity of routers?
As a router manufacturer i can assure you that keeping detailed transfer records at today backbone's speeds is totally infeasible. (I do not say impossible, but the equipment capable of doing that doesn't exist, and would cost _at least_ two orders of magnitude more than conventional routers). Of course, someone may come up with schemes like the "cost counter" in the packets, but why bother? By and large the economic case for fine grained distance-sensitive Internet service is non-existent. --vadim PS If anyone wonders where i got cost estimate consider that full OC-12c produces about 250kpps, or about 25k flows/sec. That produces storage requirement at 0.5Mb / sec, or 43Gb / day. For any reasonable billing one have to keep records for at least a year.
On Fri, May 29, 1998 at 08:09:24AM -0700, Vadim Antonov wrote:
As a router manufacturer i can assure you that keeping detailed transfer records at today backbone's speeds is totally infeasible. (I do not say impossible, but the equipment capable of doing that doesn't exist, and would cost _at least_ two orders of magnitude more than conventional routers).
Oh. Then it's considerably worse than just "three times the CPU". Ok. Thanks, Vadim. ;-) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Member of the Technical Staff Unsolicited Commercial Emailers Sued The Suncoast Freenet "Two words: Darth Doogie." -- Jason Colby, Tampa Bay, Florida on alt.fan.heinlein +1 813 790 7592 Managing Editor, Top Of The Key sports e-zine ------------ http://www.totk.com
As a router manufacturer i can assure you that keeping detailed transfer records at today backbone's speeds is totally infeasible.
Why would it need to be done at the backbone? Isn't it possible to have a statistically valid sampling of packets even at the highest speeds? You'd know better than I would. I hope the answer is yes, because that is valuable data even if not used for billing. -- Shields, CrossLink.
Why would it need to be done at the backbone?
Isn't it possible to have a statistically valid sampling of packets even at the highest speeds? You'd know better than I would. I hope the answer is yes, because that is valuable data even if not used for billing. -- Shields, CrossLink.
And when someone argues that your data and/or collection methods are flawed and refuses to pay, what do you do? The circuit switch world that people are comparing this to keep full records at all network ingress/egress points, which between ISPs are often their busiest boxes. AT&T does not trust PacBell to just send them the money, both sides account each transaction. What is valuable for engineering and what is required for accounting and billing are way different, one has to be able to stand up in court. The other point of unmetered usage is a direct motive to keep the growth of use as high as possible. Some people believe that the "meteoric rise in Internet usage" is an important part of marketing plans and thus things that reduce it are bad. I have certainly used arguments like this in the past to argue against metered networking in corporations. You may kill far more than wasteful use if you discourage people from using the Internet whenever they want to, which metered billing would. jerry
Michael Shields wrote:
As a router manufacturer i can assure you that keeping detailed transfer records at today backbone's speeds is totally infeasible.
Why would it need to be done at the backbone?
Because edges do not have information about the topology and routing, and so cannot asses distance-sensitive charges. Distance-insensitive per-bit charging is certainly feasible and is being practiced by some ISPs (typically as "burstable" T-1 or T-3 service). In fact, even those charges aren't likely to stand against close legal scrunity. Example of a scenario of a rationale for action against ISP X - they count received and transmitted packets on a user link. Unfortunalely, they also count packets they didn't deliver due to some packet loss in their backbone. Bingo - they charge customers for service not provided. This is fraud, pure and simple. Sorry if i gave the idea to lawyers...
Isn't it possible to have a statistically valid sampling of packets even at the highest speeds?
Good luck doing billing based on statistical sampling.
You'd know better than I would. I hope the answer is yes, because that is valuable data even if not used for billing.
Yep, that is somewhat useful data. Fortunaltely, you do not need to identify particular customers for the purposes of traffic engineering, so the problem is much simpler. Unfortunately, traffic matrices are rather useless in the Internet world - because congestion control nicely compensates for overloaded paths. I've seen T-3s getting introduced into a not particularly overloaded-looking T-1 backbone, just to get filled right away. BTW, I have a (relatively) simple solution to the Internet traffic engineering problem, but you'll have to sign an NDA if you want to know it. I already have a long list of people who "forgot" to give me any credit for things i invented. --vadim
Why would it need to be done at the backbone?
Because edges do not have information about the topology and routing, and so cannot asses distance-sensitive charges.
Since most of this distance stuff is being calculated by IP address or ASN, why wouldn't the edge routers have SRC IP, DST IP, and "MY IP." And why couldn't a collector make any other adjustments necessary?
Distance-insensitive per-bit charging is certainly feasible and is being practiced by some ISPs (typically as "burstable" T-1 or T-3 service).
In fact, even those charges aren't likely to stand against close legal scrunity. Example of a scenario of a rationale for action against ISP X - they count received and transmitted packets on a user link. Unfortunalely, they also count packets they didn't deliver due to some packet loss in their backbone. Bingo - they charge customers for service not provided. This is fraud, pure and simple. Sorry if i gave the idea to lawyers...
A lot of people like the word fraud. I am not sure many ISP contracts guarantee delivery of packets to their final destination, but most seem to say that the burstable rate is based on how many packets enter your connection port, or "enter the ISP's backbone." Even service level agreements are generally based on link loss to the customer and not end-to-end backbone loss. Anyone who opens themselves up for loss inside a backbone is hiring the wrong set of attorneys. IMO.
Isn't it possible to have a statistically valid sampling of packets even at the highest speeds?
Good luck doing billing based on statistical sampling.
Hello, Netflow? -Deepak.
Some crystal ball gazing... I expect to see an amount of distance billing in the future, but only alongside QoS billing, for example. Email - Non urgent, low traffic - I would expect this to remain flat rate (i.e. Free with connection). As with browsing traffic etc. Caches will add an intersting factor to this model, e.g Retrieving files from the ISP's local cache - (Free with connection), Retrieving from distant locations, perhaps dependant on time of day etc. Voice over IP - This is starting to get bandwidth and delay sensitive dependant on the efficiency of the Internet in the future, I expect this might start to be billed dependant on distance/providers travelled over etc. As otherwise if two ISP's do not directly connect or peer, an intermediate ISP would have to carry this traffic. If this traffic requires a high QoS, I would imagine the intermediate ISP would want to charge for it. Video over IP - When it comes around and end users via their xDSL connections want to receive 1.5Mbs of video traffic - I can see definate costs being incurred. Of course multicast techniques, caching etc will make this not a geographical distance based pricing model, but a pricing model will surely evolve. Of course this argument of carrying others traffic applies to peering also, if two ISP's peer a similar amount of data, no problem, but if it is one sided then billing would have to occur. In other words, we will all buy and sell our connectivity to each other. One thing this state of affairs would lead to if it occurs is some scope for very interesting pricing models, value adds etc. A topic measured earlier was the ratio between payroll/equipment costs vs line costs. The ratio of this will depend on the model of the ISP. A dialup provider will incurr much higher support costs for a much smaller bandwidth than a transit/backbone provider, which the line costs would be expected to be the majority of their costs. ... Perhaps a bit more than 2 cents... Julian Rose ---------------------------------------------------------- Internet Planning & Design AT&T Unisource Communications Services, Hoofddorp, Holland Tel: +31 (0)23 569 7878 Fax: +31 (0)23 569 7455 ----------------------------------------------------------
Michael Shields writes:
Despite preductions, very few resources have ever actually become "too cheap to meter".
Television? Local phone service in many places? Matchbooks? Sewer service?
Television's incremental cost of another viewer is zero, and always has been. This is not a matter of being too cheap to meter. Matchbooks are not given away in unlimited quantities. I honestly have no idea how sewer service is priced, or how the US came to have flat-rate local calling. -- Shields, CrossLink.
On Fri, May 29, 1998 at 07:02:23AM +0000, Michael Shields wrote:
Can you back up your comment about metering requiring three times the current CPU capacity of routers?
No, I pulled it outta my butt. But I do hear that a significant amount of router CPU is necessary to add this function, particularly at high packet rates, and a similar amount of analysis CPU would then also be necessary. Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth jra@baylink.com Member of the Technical Staff Unsolicited Commercial Emailers Sued The Suncoast Freenet "Two words: Darth Doogie." -- Jason Colby, Tampa Bay, Florida on alt.fan.heinlein +1 813 790 7592 Managing Editor, Top Of The Key sports e-zine ------------ http://www.totk.com
participants (10)
-
Deepak Jain -
Jay R. Ashworth -
Jerry Scharf -
John A. Tamplin -
Julian Rose -
miquels＠cistron.nl -
Perry E. Metzger -
shields＠crosslink.net -
Tim Pozar -
Vadim Antonov