[1851] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Commercial Use Scenario CONTINUED aka Com-bits Divined
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Marvin Sirbu)
Fri Jan 3 09:34:30 1992
Date: Fri, 3 Jan 1992 09:33:17 -0500 (EST)
From: Marvin Sirbu <ms6b+@andrew.cmu.edu>
To: com-priv@psi.com, cook@tmn.com (Gordon Cook)
Cc:
In-Reply-To: <9201030040.AA19441@tmn.com>
Excerpts From Captions of bboard.com-priv:
3-Jan-92 Commercial Use Scenario CON.. Gordon Cook@tmn.com (6993)
> I am not sure that I understand your preceding paragraph. i sounds like
> you are saying that if I am a mid-level - say for example that I am
> Suranet and I sign your connectivity agreement, then I am agreeing that I
> have some institutions that are attached which wish to receive commercial
> transmissions from ANS. My institutions that wish to receive the
> commercial transmissions, presumably wish to return them. (ie this is
> what you mean by bi-directional) You say that networks are classified by
> the acceptable use policy they choose to conform to. Does it follow that
> if I sign a connectivity agreement with ANS, I am agreeing to classify at
> least a PART of the institutions attached to my network as commercial and
> pay com bit surcharges on their traffic? This must be correct because
> then the next exchange between us makes sense
I have no affiliation with ANS or a mid-level but I have read carefully
the ANS agreement, including its appendix C which gives the formulas for
calculating charges. My understanding is NOT consistent with the above
paragraph. The way I read the rules, if SURANET signs the connectivity
agreement, their R&E attached customers are free to exchange traffic
(both receive and send) to commericial customers of ANS with no cost
implication to SURANET whatsoever. This is because the formula
specifies that COMBITS between a commerical user and R&E site are
counted as R&E for mid-level supportinge R&E entity while counting as
commericial for the network supporting the commerical entity at the
other end of the communication. Thus no commericial COMBITs are credited
to SURANET for this traffic exchange. Under these circumstances, 100%
of SURANET's traffic is counted as R&E traffic and there is no surcharge
to SURANET for agreeing to carry this traffic.
SURANET incurs commercial COMBITs ONLY if a customer of SURANET declares
itself to be a commercial user (as opposed to an R&E user) -- and
SURANET agrees to accept such customers. At that point, traffic between
the commercial customer atttached to SURANET and commericial customers
attached to ANS are counted as commercial traffic for both SURANET and
ANS, and SURANET will be liable for a surcharge in proportion to the
amount of such traffic. That is why the statistics are collected based
on origin-destination pairs, and not simply based on the sender or the
destination. You need to be able to classify BOTH the origin and
destination in order to determine how the traffic is to be accounted for.
Would someone from ANS please verify this interpretation?
Marvin Sirbu
Engineering and Public Policy
Carnegie Mellon University
