Re: IP Accounting & Charge Back Methodolgies & Approaches

[[e-mail]]

 > The archive of the aewg-accounting mailing list is available
 > on aarnet.edu.au (I think under /aewg somewhere). We've been
 > discussing the subject...

I apologize for that informal response. I didn't notice the
Reply-to header (again). Perhaps having distracted everyone
on this list with that terse and inaccurate note I should
make a few comments about our deliberations to date.

First comment is that the correct location for the archive
is ftp://aarnet.edu.au/pub/aewg/aewg-accounting. You can
join the mailing list by sending mail to 
[e-mail]. Remember if you join 
that we are discussing Australian not general charging and
accounting issues.

There are a couple of things that makes AARNet different to
a network in America. The first is that a very significant
component of our costs is the international link. A lot has 
been said about the value of connecting networks on an equal
basis but it does break down in this situation. Clearly the
rest of the world is a lot bigger than us so we use a lot
more services in the rest of the world than the rest of the 
world uses in Australia. So it seems fair that we should pay
the majority of the cost of the link that joins us to the 
world. On the other hand it doesn't seem entirely fair that
we should pay all of it. However that is the way things are.
Since upgrading the international link is extremely expensive
we need to make sure that users (at least at the organization
level) get some cost feed-back based on their usage of the
link. This also seems the right way to fund increases in the
link bandwidth, rather than raising the costs of major and
minor users of the link alike.

Beyond that interstate links are also expensive in Australia.
So the AARNet board has decided that AARNet will move to a
usage-based charging scheme. The aewg-accounting  group was not
established to advise the board. Rather it is a self-formed
group to look at technical issues of various user-pays schemes.
We figured that if we had something sensible to say it would 
have some influence indirectly and this may have happened.

A proposal that has high-level support is to keep the cost of
connecting to AARNet to a minimum (more or less cost) and raise
most revenue by charging wide area traffic by total received 
bytes. Charging the recipient has two big wins:

1. It protects the service providers. The people providing free
   services are the life-blood of the network and we don't want
   to discourage them. And we want commercial service providers
   to connect at the minimum possible cost.

2. The packet recipient is the beneficiary of the transfer with
   high probability. Charging the recipient works out about
   right in practice.

Recent discussion has been on various possible problems with
this proposal. Of course there are a lot of aspects of this
which are not specific to Australia and could reasonably be
discussed on this more general mailing list. If you like I will
post a (biased) summary of the identified problems and suggested 
solutions, but this message is long enough.

Bob Smart