For everything that has been said about charging for bandwidth, I don't
see why a simple, low priced per-gigabyte model doesn't work. If you want
to go to the ironic side, try using free software to do it all...
http://www2.empnet.com/ipacct/
For sake of simplicity, let's consider the case of _one_ global network
which wants to charge its customers based on the some semblance of actual
cost (i.e. ignore peering for the moment). Step one: hunt down all the
marketing folks chanting "value-based pricing" and lock them in a empty
colo facility. Step two: determine what underlying resources are most
expensive (hint: check out your international circuits). Step three:
set the unit price for each underlying resource so that current total
usage of that resource times unit price would cover the current bill
for the resource. Add in a small uplift to the unit prices to handle
misc resources and margin.
All of the above is easy... The hard part is when you somehow have
to measure each customers traffic and determine their unit resource
usage. Given the relatively discrepancy in local, national, and
international circuits per Mbs/mile, you may need to categorize all
of the flows into appropriate usage buckets. This gets non-trivial
fast and diminishing returns approaches very quickly. Currently,
most US providers simply lump the international traffic in with
everything else and effectively sell "blended bits". Total traffic
is easy to measure via SNMP, but most folks are referring to something
more when the use the phrase "ip accounting".
/John
A publisher in Hawaii is preparing to release the 'whois' database
on CDROM. These are apparently the folks who got cut off by InterNIC
because of their massive download of whois records.
Story at http://www.zdnet.com/intweek/daily/980921b.html
--Lloyd
Lloyd Taylor -- taylorl@digex.net
Vice President, Technical Operations
DIGEX Web Site Management Group
An Intermedia Company
Perhaps this explains the sudden rush of p-mail I'm getting to the
address in my whois record. I modified that address subtly so that,
while it was still deliverable, I'd know if mail coming to me was
addressed from the whois file or not, and this past month I've gotten
more than in the 3 years before that.
Cheers,
-- jra
Correction.
They *were* planning to release the whois database on CDROM. That is,
until the story got posted on http://slashdot.org and they got hit by the
"Slashdot Effect".
They now have a message posted on their website:
Yeah I've been getting postal galore to my admin adresses - makes you feel
good - at least trees are dying.
If you have a problem with it, you can
1. Put return to sender on the mail
or
2. Open it, grab the postage paid letter and send it and than call the 800
number.
Christian