Re: Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste (was Re: BBN /GTEI)
What about netflow ?
[to Vadim Antonov who said that _metering_ traffic is intractable]
Dear ISP - you have made an accounting error that I am able to demonstrate in my copious traffic logs. Please credit $x to my account.
or
Dear Customer - our copious traffic logs indicate that you generated x
On 08/25/98 03:48:29 PM Sean M. Doran wrote: traffic
last month. Please pay $x net 30 days. Thank you.
Dispute resolution -- it's fun!
i think this point is the single largest barrier to doing proper billing. isp billing needs to be as bullet-proof as telco/voice billing. i suspect that with many isp's (and certainly from some of my past experience) if customers would ever have disputed an invoice we wouldn't have had a leg to stand on. i'm sure some providers have good billing systems but i know many that don't yet they do some kind of usage based billing. also, as useful as netflow can be, at oc-3 speeds and higher the sheer amount of data exported can be overwhelming both to routers and trunks (in agreement with vadim). -brett
I think there are several issues here: 1. technical process for collecting/warehousing the data 2. business process for using it to bill 3. customer service process for educating customers on usage-based billing and handling the expected questions/disputes. 1. TECHNICAL: I think as we go to higher speeds, we need to see more netflow features on the router itself (maybe a netflow processing card to do some pre-export configurable aggregation). I haven't heard of any plans from Cisco in this direction, so we're still looking at (at least) one collector per major hub. 2. BUSINESS: This thread has already discussed several ways to present the data on a bill, from very detailed to not-so-detailed. I side with the not-so-detailed approach for now. 3. CUSTOMER SERVICE: Well, we know Telco's have huge billing and customer support infrastructures, so ISP's are bound to go there too. The issue is more of revenue per customer and scale: of course a telco with $10B+ revenue can spend $500M a year or more on billing support, but an ISP with only a couple $100M revenue will have a much tougher time, and may decide this is a only for premium customers at first. Cheers, -Lane On Thu, 27 Aug 1998 Brett_Watson@enron.net wrote:
On 08/25/98 03:48:29 PM Sean M. Doran wrote:
What about netflow ?
[to Vadim Antonov who said that _metering_ traffic is intractable]
Dear ISP - you have made an accounting error that I am able to demonstrate in my copious traffic logs. Please credit $x to my account.
or
Dear Customer - our copious traffic logs indicate that you generated x traffic last month. Please pay $x net 30 days. Thank you.
Dispute resolution -- it's fun!
i think this point is the single largest barrier to doing proper billing. isp billing needs to be as bullet-proof as telco/voice billing. i suspect that with many isp's (and certainly from some of my past experience) if customers would ever have disputed an invoice we wouldn't have had a leg to stand on. i'm sure some providers have good billing systems but i know many that don't yet they do some kind of usage based billing.
also, as useful as netflow can be, at oc-3 speeds and higher the sheer amount of data exported can be overwhelming both to routers and trunks (in agreement with vadim).
-brett
participants (2)
-
Brett_Watson＠enron.net -
Lane Patterson