Re: The Great Exchange
Deepak Jain <deepak@ai.net> wrote:
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?
Neither ASNs nor network prefixes (particularly aggregated prefixes) correspond to geographical locales. To evaluate cost of end-to-end transmission one has to collect information about state of the things along the path. That information is typically totally unavailable to end-nodes and only partially available to backbones.
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.
There's such thing as implied contract. Delivery of packets to destination is a primary venue of business for ISPs, and they are reasonably expected to carry it on. When you provide flat-rate pricing it is understood that some of them won't be delivered, and customers won't be charged more for retransmission. On the other hand, when you explicitly bill for all packets, and then fail to carry on your service and then proceed to bill for a service not provided you've got a problem. I didn't see a contract language yet which would explicitly and clearly state that customers will be charged for arbitrarily high percentage of non-delivered packets. It's like a food store which sells boxes of some stuff, and some of those are empty - but you have to pay for each one and cannot return the bad ones, and have no way of knowing what your odds are. It may be legal, but not in US. --vadim
:: Vadim Antonov writes ::
There's such thing as implied contract. Delivery of packets to destination is a primary venue of business for ISPs, and they are reasonably expected to carry it on. When you provide flat-rate pricing it is understood that some of them won't be delivered, and customers won't be charged more for retransmission.
On the other hand, when you explicitly bill for all packets, and then fail to carry on your service and then proceed to bill for a service not provided you've got a problem. I didn't see a contract language yet which would explicitly and clearly state that customers will be charged for arbitrarily high percentage of non-delivered packets.
So if it's flat-rate, it's understood that they'll drop packets on the floor if they feel like it; if it's not flat-rate, then it's not understood that they'll drop packets on the floor if they feel like it. I wouldn't want to be a lawyer having to convince a judge of that. Certainly most people here know that packets are being dropped on the floor in either case. The majority of the public has no idea what a dropped packet it, much less whether their ISP is doing it. I'm having trouble believeing that there's a lot of people out there who understand the best-effort nature of today's internet / IP-networks, *and* who also think that charging per byte somehow changes that.
It's like a food store which sells boxes of some stuff, and some of those are empty - but you have to pay for each one and cannot return the bad ones, and have no way of knowing what your odds are. It may be legal, but not in US.
Actually, such a store would be quite legal[1]. But they have to disclose what they are doing. For example, the boxes I by at the local supermarket all say "Net Weight X" (or something similar) on them. So if it doesn't have X amount of stuff in it, I've been cheated. OTOH, I can also legally buy a lottery ticket, which might be worth millions and might be worth nothing -- but I'm told that in advance. (More precisely, I'm expected to know the nature of a lottery ticket before I buy one -- just as an IP transit customer is expected to know the nature of IP transit before buying it.) It's reasonable to expect that people who are in charge of networks large enough to be buying leased lines from an ISP would know the best-effort nature of IP. So as long as the contract says: "You pay for every byte you send me", I think they're covered. There's not billing for a service not provided, because the service being sold is "best effort delivery", so as long as they make a "best effort" on each packet, you pay for it. Also, this is mostly a moot point -- most of the "burstable T1" plans I've seen call for measuring utilization separately on receive and transmit, and charging based on whichever is higher. Since any ISP or End-User small enough to need just "burstable T1" service is likely to be recieving more bits than they are sending, they won't actually end up paying for retransmitted packets (or for any other transmitted packets.) [1] In some cases, it would constitute an illegal lottery, but that's still not fraud. And certainly ISPs are not illegal lotterys ... - Brett (brettf@netcom.com) ------------------------------------------------------------------------------ ... Coming soon to a | Brett Frankenberger .sig near you ... a Humorous Quote ... | brettf@netcom.com
Neither ASNs nor network prefixes (particularly aggregated prefixes) correspond to geographical locales. To evaluate cost of end-to-end transmission one has to collect information about state of the things along the path. That information is typically totally unavailable to end-nodes and only partially available to backbones.
I understand your point. However, I didn't claim that my analysis method was based on a perfect understanding of the path each individual packet took, which I agree is infeasible. Instead, it simply tries to determine the cost to deliver an average byte to prefix P. If for some reason traffic to prefix P took a different path under conditions that might be correlated with a customer's usage patterns, the cost might be higher or lower than the average. An example of this might be if there were an "overflow path" such that when line L1 was full, any additional packets were sent over line L2 instead; this would be load-dependent and therefore in practice time-dependent, and if a customer mostly sent data to P in the dead of night, their data would never transit L2, and therefore would cost less to deliver; but this cannot be accounted for in my model. Current routing protocols don't work that way, since they will not reroute traffic in the absence of a fault. However L1 and L2 might be not seperate lines balanced by a routing protocol but rather seperate pricing models on a single line, for example flat-rate up to X usage and then metered. The cost allocation is probably not worth doing. Having thought about it some more, I'd be willing to accept that this problem is intractible for a network large enough to be considering such a pricing model. -- Shields, CrossLink.
participants (3)
-
Brett Frankenberger -
shields＠crosslink.net -
Vadim Antonov