Re: Sidgmore wants "long distance" charges for Net

[Brian Bartholomew <bb@wv.com>]

> John Sidgmore has announced that he'd like to throw the Net back
> into the Dark Ages, imposing the distance-sensitive pricing that's
> such a windfall for old-fashioned telephone companies.

I shudder at the technical infrastructure it would take to evaluate
each packet for path distance.  Counting packets that cross an
interface is one thing.  Judging each of them for distance is quite
another.  You'd have to build an accurate model of the total Internet
topology into every price-tracking router.  The cost of connectivity
would increase some multiple.  But, as long as he's not a monopoly,
he's entitled to try any crazy pricing scheme he wants.

In the medium-sized ISP I worked at, distance-based telco line costs
were not the major problem.  Distance-derived costs were fixed and
budgetable.  The major problem was keeping up with the bursts in
demand for tech support and engineering time.

| Sidgmore said the biggest challenge to ISPs such as Fairfax,
| Va.-based Uunet (company profile), a unit of WorldCom, is presented
| by "silicon cockroaches," or computer-to-computer communications
| that cause short bursts of huge amounts of data traffic in highly
| unpredictable patterns.

Maybe that's the key to this whole announcement.  Demand for telephone
traffic is known to fall into a certain predictable distribution
shape, and people understand how to provision to meet a given service
level goal.  For whatever reason, demand for Internet traffic does not
follow the telephone curves.  It's a lot burstier, so you have to
overbuild more to meet the same service level.  If Sidgmore can
arrange the price incentives to recreate the telco traffic
distribution on the Internet, he has to overbuild less and his price
goes down.  Unfortunatly, the change in traffic pattern means users
have adapted to the network, instead of the network serving the users.

The whole notion that traffic bursts are to be discouraged is BS.  An
ISP is selling bandwidth.  If your customer uses more bandwidth, you
are supposed to be happy.  If you have to build more to meet peak
demand, than raise the price per bit for bursty customers.


A member of the League for Programming Freedom (LPF) ftp://ftp.gnu.org/pub/lpf
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Brian Bartholomew - bb@wv.com - www.wv.com - Working Version, Cambridge, MA