Pushpendra Mohta wrote a good essay on economics of content distribution. Now, i have a silly question -- should we bother with any elaborate pricing? I don't think the current Internet economy is broken. --vadim
The big problem is the current incentive to cripple network connections. Why should it cost more to connect at 100MB/sec vs. 56KB/sec? If the same amount of packets are transfered? Why should I pay more beyond the one-time cost of buying interface electronics? Many real-time problems with packet switching (out of order arrival of packets, need to re-order packets) essentially go away when speed increases, i.e. things move out of perceptible ranges into in-perceptible time variations. Settlement based on whoever takes more traffic would be nice. It gives a very direct incentive to build better networks. Lets say MAE's and NAP's are run in a cost-recovery mode and my only monthly cost as a network is the cost of my circuits, i.e. having a connection to the MAE/NAP. As soon as my network takes more traffic than my circuit costs I'm making money. Money that can be used directly to build a better network which will take even more traffic, i.e. generate more money. In a sense, this would provide best case capitalism with routers deciding from whom to buy. All energy would go into building better networks... neither advertising, nor salespeople are necessary in this scenario! Dirk On Sun, 26 Jan 1997, Vadim Antonov wrote:
Pushpendra Mohta wrote a good essay on economics of content distribution.
Now, i have a silly question -- should we bother with any elaborate pricing? I don't think the current Internet economy is broken.
--vadim
Dirk Harms-Merbitz writes:
Why should it cost more to connect at 100MB/sec vs. 56KB/sec? If the same amount of packets are transfered? Why should I pay more beyond the one-time cost of buying interface electronics?
Because what costs money is engineering for peak usage. If you can send traffic at 100MB/sec instead of 56KB/sec your peak usage can (and likely will) be much higher.
Why should it cost more to connect at 100MB/sec vs. 56KB/sec? If the same amount of packets are transfered? Why should I pay more beyond the one-time cost of buying interface electronics?
This argument doesn't work in auto traffic engineering nor IP traffic engineering. It is what happens at rush hour that you really want to concentrate on.
Now, i have a silly question -- should we bother with any elaborate pricing? I don't think the current Internet economy is broken.
Well, nobody who owns a network is going to ask most of us here on NANOG how they ought to charge for it, anyway. And for that reason, this thread is not relevant to NANOG's charter -- we're here to talk operations, right? The NANOG tie-in comes from the overlap between networks which peer and networks which work well. In the past, ops folks made peering decisions based on what would shorten the average AS path or other strictly operational concerns. Ops folks are hardly ever allowed to make these decisions any more on the really big networks. Some of us are having trouble adjusting to that and so we keep talking about the reasons "why". So no, the current Internet economy isn't broken, but it's sort of surfing, and the folks on NANOG seem very interested in the directions it's taken and will yet take. Peering is the perfect example of something which is neither purely ops nor purely management/finance. We just don't seem to be able to leave it alone on NANOG, anyway.
participants (5)
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Craig Nordin -
Dirk Harms-Merbitz -
J. Malcolm -
Paul A Vixie -
Vadim Antonov