VALDIS@CLVM.CLARKSON.EDU (Valdis Kletnieks) (04/26/88)
Uh.. OK. I *enjoy* all this theoredical chit-chat about passing moneygrams
and how to place a collect VC call over TCP and all the rest.
Now I have an interesting question motivated from self-interest:
We here at Clarkson have two links into the Internet - one via Nysernet
and one via Milnet (which we'll ignore for right now).
Now - my users just say 'telnet some.bogon.host.domain' and boom they're
there. Now, that connection might be via Nysernet only - which requires
no billing. Or it may be nysernet+nsfnet. Or maybe
nysernet+arpanet+suranet. The point is that now not only do the bean
counters have to keep track of the usage on the internet core, but the
gateways must also do bill-back for the people behind them.
I know that my users will freak if we suddenly restrict them to 'free
call' sites only. Especially if gateways being up/down make day-to-day
differences. (Huh? Why did I get billed for this telnet session to
BNL? It always uses Nysernet. Sorry Charlie, that day a router was
down at Cornell and it went via MilNet).
I know my finance department is going to freak trying to do the
bill-back. Sites that ARE on billable nets are going to want to dun us
for our packets. (Heck, if I was the gate from Clarkson to MIT, *I*
wouldn't swallow the charges for a Clarkson user FTP'ing in X11R2 or GNU
Emacs or.....) Of course, this leaves all the gates billinging all the
nets. With 400 or so nets reachable, and I don't know HOW many gates,
it's gonna become a zoo really fast... (Hmm. We got a bill from 3
gateways at Cornell to 5 users, and another from someplace in
Pittsburgh, and this place in Saskechewan wants its $1.25 for the 15
packets from Bozoville and.....)
I guess the bottom line is that it won't fly unless the ENTIRE Internet goes
with the same scheme, even those regional nets that don't otherwise CARE.
Well, that's enough rambling on a heavy-duty mailing list. Hmm. Am I gonna
get a bill for this? :-)
Valdis Kletnieks
Systems Programmer
Clarkson University
P.S. Standard disclaimers apply. I'm just rambling on my own time.
As such, the people I answer to don't even know I mailed this yet....kzm@TWG.COM (04/26/88)
> I know that my users will freak if we suddenly restrict them to 'free > call' sites only. Especially if gateways being up/down make day-to-day > differences. (Huh? Why did I get billed for this telnet session to > BNL? It always uses Nysernet. Sorry Charlie, that day a router was > down at Cornell and it went via MilNet). You raise an interesting issue : the mixing of free networks and charge-back networks. In practice this is bound to occur when the first charge-back scheme gets introduced. Even if all networks became charge-back after some period of time, it's hardly likely that they will all charge the same amount. This points out (in my view) that charging within an internet (consisting of multiple separately-administered networks) cannot be done at the application layer (i.e. charging for individual Telnet/FTP sessions), but rather must be done at the IP layer. Since the IP layer is datagram oriented, charging will have to be done on the basis of packets sent/received (but not necessarily based on packet-counts, e.g. charging could be based on time periods during which packets were sent). There's also the spectre of a central WAN administration charging each of its neighbouring administrations, which might pass on the charges to its users, some of whom might be other adminstrations, and etc. !!! Given that users need to be able to specify whether (and how much ?) they are willing to pay, it would appear that the decision to route a packet across a charge-back network must be made by IP routers, and therefore must be made based on the content of a packet's IP header. If so, IP's Type-of-Service could be the right place for the information to be encoded (e.g. "cost" to be added to the existing Delay/Throughput/Reliability, although one bit is probably not enough information, especially if "collect" were encoded here also). Keith McCloghrie The Wollongong Group.
perry@MCL.UNISYS.COM (Dennis Perry) (04/26/88)
Valdis, you raise an interesting point about multiple routes and some nets that charge and some that don't. This gets into some interesting issues about routing and routing restrictions. Indeed, one might develop several PhD thesis about 'routing with restrictions' or gateways that spend 50% of there time deciding if they can accept you packet (no money, wrong organization, wrong destination, etc.) A similar issue apparent arose in the Arpanet connections to Europe that went over x.25 links thru the PTTs. The X.25 networks wanted to charge the Arpanet for traffice originating in the Arpanet destined to Europe, across the X.25 links. The Europeans were already paying for their half. DARPA refused to pay, making the argument that it was a 'wash'. If we charged the Europeans to carry their traffic and they charged us to carry their traffic, the excercise was one of exchanging the same amount of money, so why waste the money on the overhead of breaking even? The net result was the Europeans pay for both directions of traffic. dennis
Mills@UDEL.EDU (04/26/88)
Dennis, You may have left out the most interesting fact: Reverse-charging was not available for international public packet-switching nets. So far as I know, it still is not available. Consider how the various carriers collect charges in the case of a call placed to a ship at sea. The landside originator pays (1) the landline segment from point of origin to coastal radio station (possibly international), (2) the radio station usage itself and (3) the ship radio station usage. Any or all three charges may be payable to operators in different countries. While payable in different currencies, all charges must be expressable in Swiss Francs; however, the caller may pay his local carrier in the currency of origin, so you can see there may be lots of Swiss francs floating around for each call. Once a year the various countries settle their accounts with each other (in Swiss francs). If everything works right (your "wash" rule), very little currency actually has to change hands. If a balance-of-Swiss- francs is not preserved, some carrier, station or ship may need to invest some capital to correct the imbalance. Here's another one: venerable coastal station WLO (Mobile, AL) operates a high-seas radio bulletin board/mail relay using SITOR (semi-reliable HF radio link protocol) which, presumably, can relay onward via landline to domestic destinations. To the above we add volume charges, selection of domestic carrier and mailbox system charges. I submit this community may not be the first to squarely face the charging issue. Dave
perry@MCL.UNISYS.COM (Dennis Perry) (04/27/88)
Dave, as you may know by now, John Laws, bless his heart, has set me straight on the way x.25 charges were made or not made as the case may be. I am also constantly amazed at the mass of information you have stored in your permenant memory on type of networks and stories attached thereto. I do not doubt that there are many inovative ways to make money in this world. I like the one about the DJ who announced on the air to send him $20 and he now as $240K and doesn't know what to do with it. He gave no reason for people to send him money, just that they do it. I suspect some of are like that. When someone says send money for the datagram I just sent you, we will, no questions asked. dennis
LAWS@rsre.mod.UK (John Laws, on UK.MOD.RSRE) (04/27/88)
Dennis, Not so. The issue with X25 connected to Arpanet was that the caller pays for the whole circuit - not half. When Europe called Arpanet that was fine, Europe paid. But if for example e-mail was routing from Arpanet to Europe over X25 and a X25 call had to be opened then Arpanet would be billed. Bob Kahn then proposed that in such situations he would raise a matching equal bill from Arpanet to be paid by Europe. (Remember between Europe and US it is not possible to do reverse charging on X25 for legal reasons rather than technical I understand.) So as of now if X25 is used between Europe and Arpanet it is only used in the west direction. Traffic initiated in Arpanet for Europe takes other paths - and that is another issue. I have found this discussion most interesting because it parallels many of the issues I see in how to route within the future NATO community of interconnected peer level National/Service networks. John
Mills@UDEL.EDU (04/27/88)
Dennis, Gotta tell you that I worked my way through undergrad school partly as a DJ/combo man for every radio station within ten miles of Ann Arbor, MI.\ This was during the Payola years and, lemme tell you, a DJ that collected $240 that way would instantly be connected from the base of the antenna to ground with full carrier on. My how times they do change... Dave
CERF@A.ISI.EDU (04/27/88)
Dennis, one of the reasons policy based routing is important is to accommodate charging. Some nets may say "don't send traffic to me if you can't pay for it" - it happens in the X.25 public data net arena all the time. Vint
CERF@A.ISI.EDU (04/27/88)
Internatinal reverse charging has not been implemented, in general, because it was too hard to collect from the calling party (usually, reverse charges were billed back to the caller along with services rendered at the destination of the call - as in timesharing service). Some experiments in international reverse charing have been conducted. Between the U.S. and Canada, for example, calls are treated as "domestic" for purpose of allowing reverse charging. Clarification: in reverse charging, the network bills the called party, but typically, the called party bills the costs back to the caller, bundled with other service charges. Vint