Metered IP billing is indeed possible
So, umm, who here recently claimed that packet metering and billing in an ISP/IP setting is technically impossible? In my mailbox this evening I see:
Cisco, Solect Offer Usage-Based Billing Solution
Cisco Systems, Inc., a global leader in Internet networking, and Solect Technology Group, a leading provider of infrastructure software solutions for service providers, have announced current availability of IAF/NetFlow, an advanced usage-based billing system integrating Cisco's NetFlow software into Solect's Internet Administration Framework (IAF) product used by high-speed, broadband network and service providers for commercial and business users.
Solect sells telco billing systems. There are other products about to hit the market which do IP metering, and they're going to use telco billing systems as a back end as well. The metered billing steamroller is coming, people. Settlements won't be too far behind. Watch out, because the telcos have over 100 years of experience playing this game. (What was that NANOG 13 T-shirt slogan again, hm?) Bruce Hahne hahne@netcom.com
Neat. While I wasn't one that claimed it was impossible, I suggest you try sending the originally proposed site by site traffic data to your regular joe average dialup user and see what response you get (remember you will need to accompany the bill with 30 pages of lines like: file index.html NNN bytes long transferred from host xyz.com at 11:39:06 on 7/9/98). Oh, by the way you need to store all this data for long enough that you can legally resolve billing disputes. The proposed original goal was to provide DETAIL so that the poor dialup user would be able to figure out which web sites were the BAD ones sending all the data. This billing problem was brought up in regards to a receiver pays system. Of course this kind of billing information is USELESS if they only visited the site once or a few times. Because of this even providing the end user with this information (presuming they are all network or software engineers and know how to read it) won't fix the problem of encouraging waste in a transaction settlement system. Interesting package anyway. Mike. On Tue, 25 Aug 1998, Bruce Hahne wrote:
So, umm, who here recently claimed that packet metering and billing in an ISP/IP setting is technically impossible? In my mailbox this evening I see:
Cisco, Solect Offer Usage-Based Billing Solution
Cisco Systems, Inc., a global leader in Internet networking, and Solect Technology Group, a leading provider of infrastructure software solutions for service providers, have announced current availability of IAF/NetFlow, an advanced usage-based billing system integrating Cisco's NetFlow software into Solect's Internet Administration Framework (IAF) product used by high-speed, broadband network and service providers for commercial and business users.
Solect sells telco billing systems. There are other products about to hit the market which do IP metering, and they're going to use telco billing systems as a back end as well. The metered billing steamroller is coming, people. Settlements won't be too far behind. Watch out, because the telcos have over 100 years of experience playing this game. (What was that NANOG 13 T-shirt slogan again, hm?)
Bruce Hahne hahne@netcom.com
+------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 408 282 1540 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting & Co-location Fax 408 971 3340 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+
Bruce Hahne wrote:
So, umm, who here recently claimed that packet metering and billing in an ISP/IP setting is technically impossible? In my mailbox this evening I see:
Cisco, Solect Offer Usage-Based Billing Solution
Cisco Systems, Inc., a global leader in Internet networking, and Solect Technology Group, a leading provider of infrastructure software solutions for service providers, have announced current availability of IAF/NetFlow, an advanced usage-based billing system integrating Cisco's NetFlow software into Solect's Internet Administration Framework (IAF) product used by high-speed, broadband network and service providers for commercial and business users.
Aw. A sign of neophyte. If Cisco sells something it doesn't mean it makes any sense. Where Cisco (Con)Fusion went? And, yeah, the wonderful clustering solution to the eternal not-enough-speed- and-not-enough-ports screams from ISPs. Did anyone actually try to collect detailed billing-ready information on customer traffic flows on any decent size backbone? Oh, well. That kind of traffic analysis can make sense in corporate networks (though fast LANs are _cheap_). Few people really understand how huge the Internet is. So huge, in fact, that anything requiring more than O(log N) operations to compute is not feasible on a daily basis (where N is the number of end-hosts). And yes, Internet is growing faster than box performance -- so things which are not feasible now aren't going to be feasible tomorrow. Quite opposite, if anything. How about collecting billing records at a terabit per second? That kind of speed is demonstrably doable with today's technology. --vadim
participants (3)
-
Bruce Hahne -
Mike Leber -
Vadim Antonov