Date: Wed, 28 Aug 1996 20:12:51 -0700 From: Vadim Antonov <avg@quake.net> To: ed@texas.net, jerry@fc.net Subject: Re: MFS WorldCom/WilTel/LDDS Cc: nanog@merit.edu [...] To be more precise it would have had merit if Internet metering was at least remotely technically feasible. [...]
The easiest point to measure traffic is undoubtedly on the link between the customer and its ISP. I believe that many ISPs are already measuring the total amount of traffic into and out of each customer. I even saw a complicated pricing formula from one ISP which added a surcharge cor customers which passed a lot of traffic over the last time period (some number of months, I seem to recall). So, at least at one point, we already have at least one example of an ISP which had a component of its pricing based on the amount of traffic transferred over a dedicated connection. A number of other usage-based charging schemes have been proposed which were based on tractable measurements, (e.g., settlements of all sorts of flavors, combits, ...). Measuring traffic accurately enough to use the results in charging is not hard. On the other hand, it is possible to invent measuring schemes which are impossible to implement, (e.g., a host-to-host traffic matrix gathered somewhere nearer the "core" [whatever that is] of the Net. On the other hand, I probably missed your point... -tjs
Tim Salo writes...
[...]
The easiest point to measure traffic is undoubtedly on the link between the customer and its ISP. I believe that many ISPs are already measuring the total amount of traffic into and out of each customer. I even saw a complicated pricing formula from one ISP which added a surcharge cor customers which passed a lot of traffic over the last time period (some number of months, I seem to recall). So, at least at one point, we already have at least one example of an ISP which had a component of its pricing based on the amount of traffic transferred over a dedicated connection.
Metered pricing is already a reality with at least a couple of providers that I know of. Interestingly enough, I switched primary providers a few months ago because my provider at the time was switching from a flat rate scheme to a metered one. The end result was that at my current usage level, my monthly rate would more than double. I'm not exactly sure what conclusions you can draw from this, so I'll just stop now. -- Matt Ranney - mjr@eit.com This is how I sign all my messages.
If we meter things so that free content is too expensive to provide, and things like Alta Vista (and Gatekeeper.dec.com for that matter) disappear, will the net still be attractive to newbies? Will ISP customer bases still grow? I'm not sure we're over the hump yet, economically. Right now if all we had for content is the set of self supporting (profitable) sites who could afford to pay metered rates for the packets they emit, it would slow down the growth rate. Most people in the internet business (tier 1 or anyplace else) have got their whole business plan designed around growth. That's how they invest, that's how they expect payback to be paid back, that's where they've put all of their risks. Here in 1996, growth is still more important than fairness (TCP vs. UDP). We can increase fairness using smart queuing and other technology tricks that would not have the dramatic (according to me) effect on growth that metering or settlements would have. Let's take the golden eggs as they come out rather than killing the goose.
If we meter things so that free content is too expensive to provide, and things like Alta Vista (and Gatekeeper.dec.com for that matter) disappear, will the net still be attractive to newbies? Will ISP customer bases still grow?
No, but another 'net will be. Maybe not "the Internet", but my bet is that the pay-for-use-and-better-service 'net will be the subset of "the Internet", not "the Internet" itself. Btw, once people get connected I'm convinced you could turn off web use and they'd still stick around for < $20/month. But I don't think it'll come to that. Avi
On Thu, 29 Aug 1996, Paul A Vixie wrote:
I'm not sure we're over the hump yet, economically. Right now if all we had for content is the set of self supporting (profitable) sites who could afford to pay metered rates for the packets they emit, it would slow down the growth rate.
Right. Many people don't know that the Internet is version 2 of the net. Version 1 of the net was metered from the transport structure right out to the content level. It flopped.
Let's take the golden eggs as they come out rather than killing the goose.
What an apt description of version 1 of the net! P.S. version one used X.25 instead of IP and NAPLPS instead of HTML and was called the Videotex industry. Michael Dillon - ISP & Internet Consulting Memra Software Inc. - Fax: +1-604-546-3049 http://www.memra.com - E-mail: michael@memra.com
Paul A Vixie writes:
If we meter things so that free content is too expensive to provide, and things like Alta Vista (and Gatekeeper.dec.com for that matter) disappear, will the net still be attractive to newbies? Will ISP customer bases still grow?
I've sort of lost track here, but who said anything about metering anyway? There are lots of ways to do usage-based pricing that have been with us for a long time.
Most people in the internet business (tier 1 or anyplace else) have got their whole business plan designed around growth.
Yep, me too.
Here in 1996, growth is still more important than fairness (TCP vs. UDP). We can increase fairness using smart queuing and other technology tricks
If that can be and is done, it's fine with me, but will it be done in time? My growth is already being hindered by people being unable to get through the net's core to sites they want to reach. They leave the net, disillusioned. It's hard to imagine what things will be like when the looming UDP-based-multi-media explosion is added to this. -- Dick St.Peters, Gatekeeper, Pearly Gateway, Ballston Spa, NY stpeters@NetHeaven.com Owner, NetHeaven 518-885-1295/800-910-6671 Albany/Saratoga/Glens Falls/North Creek/Lake Placid/Blue Mountain Lake First Internet service based in the 518 area code
we can increase fairness using smart queuing and other technology tricks
If that can be and is done, it's fine with me, but will it be done in time? My growth is already being hindered by people being unable to get through the net's core to sites they want to reach. They leave the net, disillusioned. It's hard to imagine what things will be like when the looming UDP-based-multi-media explosion is added to this.
Since I use programmable routers, I plan to reprogram them such that when an interface output queue is full or getting full, and it's time to do Van's trick of "pick a number from 1 to N+1 and destroy that packet", the chance of a UDP getting blasted will be higher than for a TCP. This is predicated on (1) TCP is mostly well behaved, except when it comes form a Netscape browser opening too many (more than one) simultaneous TCP connection to the same destination; (2) UDP apps I care about, like DNS, will do reasonable things like fallback and timeout and retry; and (3) it is OK to violate the layering if it makes your network stop melting. If you think this would be a useful feature, ask Cisco to make it part of SPD.
In message <9608292204.AA32610@wisdom.home.vix.com>, Paul A Vixie writes:
we can increase fairness using smart queuing and other technology tricks
If that can be and is done, it's fine with me, but will it be done in time? My growth is already being hindered by people being unable to get through the net's core to sites they want to reach. They leave the net, disillusioned. It's hard to imagine what things will be like when the looming UDP-based-multi-media explosion is added to this.
Since I use programmable routers, I plan to reprogram them such that when an interface output queue is full or getting full, and it's time to do Van's trick of "pick a number from 1 to N+1 and destroy that packet", the chance of a UDP getting blasted will be higher than for a TCP.
This is predicated on (1) TCP is mostly well behaved, except when it comes form a Netscape browser opening too many (more than one) simultaneous TCP connection to the same destination; (2) UDP apps I care about, like DNS, will do reasonable things like fallback and timeout and retry; and (3) it is OK to violate the layering if it makes your network stop melting.
If you think this would be a useful feature, ask Cisco to make it part of SPD .
This is sort of the wrong list for this topic. A preferable scheme would be one that also weeds out misbehaving TCP implementations. This brings us back to 1984 (or earlier) and the idea of SFQ (stochastic fair queueing). Add RED GW, shake lightly (never stirred?) and maybe you've got something. Briefly: You have N queues. Take the src/dst pair and hash it, and put it in a queue, service the queues using round robin. That's SFQ in a nutshell. A somewhat orthogonal issue is how to decide when to drop. That's where RED, EPD, SPD, and others come in. Even with tail drop there is an issue of how to combine the fair queueing with the drop strategy. Do you carve the available buffer space into equal allocations or wait for some percentage of the entire buffer space to exhaust, or something else? Combining SFQ (or WFQ with SFQ suballocations ala CBQ or whatever) and RED (or EPD or Cisco SPD) is left as an exercise to the reader. Send your solutions (and if its a good one maybe your resume:) to your favorite router vendor or take the discussion to end2end-interest. ;-) Curtis
I think that metered pricing will come sometime, if not in the near future. Some charges for time online for dialup customers, some charges on the number of bytes transfered, and some charges distance/time/bandwidth used (such as Internet Fax). There are various technologies and applications being introduced which allow a dial up user to nail up a port for many many hours (such as PointCast, and many new business plans I have seen). A lot of times, the users are misusing the dial up port as dedicated port unknowingly. Of course, one can always configure authentication servers to prevent some of the misuses (such as constant pinging a host). However, with the new applications coming out everyday, it is quite difficult to do for ISPs. Just wondering how the ISPs can continue to offer $15 unlimited services, both financially and technically. I have even seen one of our partners at GRIC (An international roaming consortium) saying that they are looking for ways to stop people from running Internet phone app over their expensive $1M per year T1 over the Pacific. It seems to me that there is no need to jump ship if your ISP changed into metered services. It at least shows your provider knows what they are doing. Someday everyone has to. Hong www.aimnet.com/www.aimsoft.com/www.gric.com Gee, I own so many domain names .... Matt Ranney wrote:
Tim Salo writes...
[...]
The easiest point to measure traffic is undoubtedly on the link between the customer and its ISP. I believe that many ISPs are already measuring the total amount of traffic into and out of each customer. I even saw a complicated pricing formula from one ISP which added a surcharge cor customers which passed a lot of traffic over the last time period (some number of months, I seem to recall). So, at least at one point, we already have at least one example of an ISP which had a component of its pricing based on the amount of traffic transferred over a dedicated connection.
Metered pricing is already a reality with at least a couple of providers that I know of. Interestingly enough, I switched primary providers a few months ago because my provider at the time was switching from a flat rate scheme to a metered one. The end result was that at my current usage level, my monthly rate would more than double.
I'm not exactly sure what conclusions you can draw from this, so I'll just stop now. -- Matt Ranney - mjr@eit.com
This is how I sign all my messages.
Hong Chen writes:
I think that metered pricing will come sometime, if not in the near future.
I seriously doubt it. We live in a market driven world. The market doesn't want it. People would rather pay a higher fixed price.
There are various technologies and applications being introduced which allow a dial up user to nail up a port for many many hours (such as PointCast, and many new business plans I have seen).
So? In the long run ALL users will have dedicated lines (cable modems, ADSL, something) and their machines will be exchanging bits with other machines all day and all night. Its what the net is for. You are blaming people for using it as it was designed. Raw bandwidth is inherently cheap. Undersea lines are even fairly cheap, except nasty government price fixing keeps them expensive. Switching equipment is expensive right now but Moore's Law takes care of that over the years. In the long run (ten years) everyone in developed countries will be on the net at all times. No one is going to want metered service -- it will be too much bother -- and so long as the customers pay enough on average to cover use there is no problem. We could introduce metering now for the short run, but I'd say its smarter for people to let the ISPs charging $15 a month to just go out of business, and let the ones charging a reasonable market rate to survive. If the customers demand low usage plans or the like people will start providing it. In short, let the market do its thing. Perry
participants (9)
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Avi Freedman -
Curtis Villamizar -
Dick St.Peters -
Hong Chen -
Matt Ranney -
Michael Dillon -
Paul A Vixie -
Perry E. Metzger -
salo＠msc.edu