[19074] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Metered IP billing is indeed possible
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Vadim Antonov)
Wed Aug 26 02:14:32 1998
Date: Tue, 25 Aug 1998 23:12:18 -0700
From: Vadim Antonov <avg@alink.net>
To: Bruce Hahne <hahne@netcom.com>
CC: nanog@merit.edu
Bruce Hahne wrote:
>
> So, umm, who here recently claimed that packet metering and billing in an
> ISP/IP setting is technically impossible? In my mailbox this evening I see:
>
> > Cisco, Solect Offer Usage-Based Billing Solution
> >
> > Cisco Systems, Inc., a global leader in Internet
> > networking, and Solect Technology Group, a leading provider
> > of infrastructure software solutions for service providers,
> > have announced current availability of IAF/NetFlow, an
> > advanced usage-based billing system integrating Cisco's
> > NetFlow software into Solect's Internet Administration
> > Framework (IAF) product used by high-speed, broadband
> > network and service providers for commercial and business
> > users.
Aw. A sign of neophyte. If Cisco sells something it doesn't mean
it makes any sense. Where Cisco (Con)Fusion went? And, yeah, the
wonderful clustering solution to the eternal not-enough-speed-
and-not-enough-ports screams from ISPs.
Did anyone actually try to collect detailed billing-ready information
on customer traffic flows on any decent size backbone?
Oh, well. That kind of traffic analysis can make sense in corporate
networks (though fast LANs are _cheap_). Few people really understand
how huge the Internet is. So huge, in fact, that anything requiring
more than O(log N) operations to compute is not feasible on a daily
basis
(where N is the number of end-hosts).
And yes, Internet is growing faster than box performance -- so things
which are not feasible now aren't going to be feasible tomorrow. Quite
opposite, if anything. How about collecting billing records at a
terabit
per second? That kind of speed is demonstrably doable with today's
technology.
--vadim
