Subject: Billing for DHCP addresses

From: [email-masked] (by way of Ralph Droms <[email-masked]>)
Date: Thu, 2 Sep 1999 11:05:20 -0400 (EDT)

message sent to [email-masked] by [email-masked] follows.
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I recognize that this question is not directly related to DHCP
technology issues, and if there is a better place to ask it, I'd love
to hear about it.

Here at the University of Pennsylvania, the central computing and
networking organization has been billing customers for central services
(Internet connectivity, central routers and switches, backbone fiber,
infrastructure servers that provide DNS, NTP, authentication, etc.)
by IP address.  In other words, users are charged a few dollars a month
for each registered IP address in the upenn.edu domain.

Lots of good arguments can be made that billing by IP address count
is a losing proposition.  On the other hand, it has some positive
properties (countable, some correlation to load and demand), and 
regardless, it is the entrenched method here and changing it will take 
years and a great many committee meetings :-)

We also provide DHCP service to residence buildings (the dorms) and to
many public spaces, and other local computing groups also run DHCP
servers on their own to serve their own areas.

Billing in a fair way for DHCP addresses has become complicated.  The
choice of address range size and lease length is compromised by
financial issues, and can no longer be selected purely on technical
merit.  Those paying for dynamic addresses would prefer tiny ranges
and/or very short lease lengths -- and determining how many addresses
have been in use over the billing cycle is a point of contention.

If you are in an organization that bills by IP address and assigns
some IP addresses dynamically, we'd love to hear how you handle this
issue.  Unfortunately, billing by some other metric is probably outside
the realm of possibility, at least in the near term.

Thanks for your input!
-- 
Mark Sirota, Technical Lead, Network Systems and Services
University of Pennsylvania, Information Systems and Computing
[email-masked], 215/573-7214