hayes.pa@XEROX.COM (10/29/87)
I recently had some correspondence about this with an informed UK source, and here is his statement about what is going on and why, and what the future should hold. Looks good. Pat Hayes ---------- The costs of transatlantic traffic, in both directions, through the UCL Arpanet gateway are borne by a UK funding agency, the Alvey Directorate/SERC . Darpa does not pay for messages originating in the USA and sent to the UK gateway, and UCL ( University College, part of London University ) has no way of charging individual American originators of messages. Some time ago, UCL needed to get more accurate statistics about UK usage to strengthen its case for more money to run the transatlantic link. To show that the gateway was a vital facility, UCL instigated the policy of requiring UK users to be properly authorised, ie officially registered as users. The cost of this bi-directional transatlantic traffic now exceeds the budget granted by Alvey/SERC to UCL. Appeals by UCL to SERC brought to light that much net traffic originating in the UK was being channelled through the very few `official' accounts. Moreover, UCL had no data on the number of US customers it serves. More recently, the increased cost of running the link has meant that UCL now wishes to track traffic originating in the USA, to help show the importance of the link. As USA to UK messages are not funded by any USA agency, then either the SERC pays for it all, via the UCL budget, or some form of charge-back to UK recipients must be instigated. This is the origin of the recent change in operating policy requiring USA users to be registered as collaborating with some specific UK group ie charging centre. Such a charge would then be allowable against individual SERC grants, rather than UCL picking up the total cost. There is no suggestion that any USA user will be refused authorisation. It is clear to all parties that this is not a satisfactory mechanism, either now or for the future. I am pleased to tell you that negotiations are now well advanced for a more permanent and sensible solution. The proposal is that the UK's SERC and the USA's NSF (more natural counterparts than Darpa) will instigate a new USA-UK link, properly jointly organised and funded for the benefit of academics. This link will, on the USA side, gateway the UK's Janet (the official name of the UK academic net) into most of the USA nets (arpa, NSF's own, Usenet etc. ) The present Arpanet-Janet link will continue until this improved NSF-Janet comes into service. There is no firm date for this yet, but I think that if people in the USA cooperate with UCL in the short term, and have a little patience and sympathy for UCL's predicament, then we should all be able to keep communicating via UCL until the next generation gateway comes into service. ---------------------