[244] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Usage Charges
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jack Haverty)
Thu Feb 28 16:46:39 1991
From: Jack Haverty <jhaverty@us.oracle.com>
To: richardt@Legato.COM
Cc: uunet!aahz.hf.intel.com!batie@Sun.COM (Alan Batie), com-priv@psi.com,
In-Reply-To: Your message of Thu, 28 Feb 91 11:54:41 -0800.
Date: Thu, 28 Feb 91 13:20:53 PST
As one of those "large corporate users", I think that there's another
perspective to take on this. Yes, accountants like constancy and
predictability. But I think that the real issue is *control* in the management
sense.
It would be very useful to have a multi-megabit path available between all sites
of a corporation, IFF it is also feasible to control the circumstances under
which that path gets used. For example, getting a huge database file from an HQ
site to remote offices by start of business the next day might justify
additional costs. But getting a huge audit file from the HQ site to an
archival-storage site for long-term safekeeping can take a day or so, using the
"gaps" in between more time-critical traffic.
Other than some rather kludgey, ad-hoc tricks with things like port numbers, I
can't think of any switch/bridge/router/host vendors with the "hooks" to provide
this kind of control. So, it's probably a good bet that large users will either
press for price caps, or simply not use the service very much until some level
of controllability is provided.
With usage charges in place, perhaps at least this issue would be made visible,
and vendors pressured to address the problem.
Jack
