Re: VCC cost models .... (was Re: Limits on SVCCs)

[[e-mail]]

> Often the "user" is not actually paying the bill.  Consequently, very often
> a pop-up dialogue box would be neither appropriate nor appreciated.

Eric,

Well, someone is still paying the bill, and that person will probably want
some accountability so the costs can be passed on to the users.  Someone
still has to pay for the call, so someone has to care (unless there is a very
generous ISP or corporation out there).  If the person paying the bill
cares, then that person will want either control over the calls, our
accountability.  This would generally mean disabling cut-through except
in special cases, or passing the cost back as close as possible to the
user.  In the first case, cut-through isn't very useful because no-one
wants to pay for it (so the user doesn't worry about it).  In the
second case there's a lot of extra accounting, so the user does have
to worry about it.  I would think this would be similar to how
many institutions currently handle long-distance accounting (only
with the Internet I can see the call volume being much higher because
the use is much more casual than a voice call - like clicking on an HTML link).

Yes, many users (especially at corporations and universities) don't have
to worry about costs now, but that's because the costs are fixed.  If these
costs were not fixed, but based on usage, I would expect users would
be made to aware of (and maybe responsible for) the new costs very quickly.

The more I think about it, the more I think cut-through would very rarely
be used in the public net simply because of the cost.  Certainly most
institutions would not allow people to make indescriminate long-distance
calls which get billed to that institution. So, when would people really
want to use cut-through (assuming doing so costs money)?  How would
the cut-through decision be managed (assuming it's not managed by 
simply not using it)?

> is frequently and uniquely unqualified to determine benefit
> for a connection as well.  Just ask yourself how many of your users can 
> distinguish TCP and UDP...

I know of very few users outside this community who could distinguish TCP
from UDP, from ATM, from PPP.  But that's not what a user would be thinking
about.  A user would be thinking "how much am I willing to pay to view
that preview of next week's Babylon 5 episode?".  They don't know or
care what the mechanism used to get it is, but will want to know what
the costs involved are.  Once knowing the cost, the user will have
to decide if the desire for accessing the information is worth the
cost (highly subjective I would say).  I don't think a router could
make this decision.  Currently, these are fixed costs and are pretty
much independent of usage (i.e., local calls, monthly ISP charges, leased
lines).  

In the long run, how will people deal with the Internet if the costs become 
usage based (regardless of who ultimately pays the bills)?  And we're
not necessarily talking about usage as most people think of usage (i.e.,
some hours of local connection to an ISP or leased line charges), but usage
based on underlying network operation which is completely invisible
and magic to most users.

BTW, does cut-through imply turning an Internet-phone session into a 
long-distance phone call? ;-)

 --- pete

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Peter Schulter					[e-mail]
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