Subject: RE: [Asrg] More 'pay per' foolishness

From: "Hannigan, Martin" <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 31 Dec 2004 10:14:09 -0500

> -----Original Message-----
> From: John Levine [mailto:[email-masked]]
> Sent: Friday, December 31, 2004 9:50 AM
> To: [email-masked]
> Cc: Hannigan, Martin
> Subject: Re: [Asrg] More 'pay per' foolishness
> 
> 
> >Peering analysis is broken out by protocol already and could easily
> >be billed accordingly. Currently, this data is used for capacity
> >planning.
> 
> That's nice.  Could you ask them, if they got port 25 traffic bills
> from all of their peers, how likely is it that they'd pay, are they
> prepared to break those bills down and send individual bills to all of
> their customers, and what are the procedures for dealing with
> customers that don't pay them?

John - I'm saying that the capabilities are in place. Do you 
understand how peering between large network entities works? 

I've classified this as "an idea". If it was already "in place" it
would be "fact". But to answer your question, companies call people
and ask for their money all the time. What makes this different?

> Metered Internet traffic has been the telcos' wet dream for a decade,
> but there is a whole lot of difference between counting backbone
> packets, which I believe they do, and an actual top to bottom billing
> system.  That's the multibillion dollar thing to which Phill referred
> that doesn't exist.  Yes, I know they're set up to bill voice minutes
> to phone customers, but ISP customers are not phone customers.

Isn't SPAM a multi-billion dollar thing? 

I'm starting to feel like 'Joey Bits' the Net.Capo is going to toss me in a
trunk and explain to me that if I don't agree with the end user
solution(s) I'm going into the Charles without a wetsuit. The horror!

-M<

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---

From: John Levine <[email-masked]>
Date: 31 Dec 2004 16:40:00 -0000

>understand how peering between large network entities works? 

You've said that some large ISPs have routers that can count the
packets per port, which I believe.  That's fine, that's the first 2%
of a billing system.

>and ask for their money all the time. What makes this different?

The fact that the other 98% doesn't exist.  Every phone switch ever
built includes facilities to meter the calls.  If you're going to bill
people for mail traffic, you need metering in every router, and it's
not there.  I can even believe that you might be able to aggregate the
metering info using SS7, if you could deal with the security issues
involved in attaching thousands of routers from thousands of ISPs to
it, but the underlying data collection at the edges isn't there.

Using the packet to enforce quotas is a lot easier, and it'd be just
as effective to deal with spam.  Why add all of the extra complication
of passing money around?

R's,
John

PS: Does anyone have any stats of the number of phone switches in the
US or the world compared to the number of Internet routers?  My
impression is that there's a lot more routers, but it'd be nice to see
some data.