[2672] in Commercialization & Privatization of the Internet
Re: Settlements
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Dave Crocker)
Tue Apr 7 18:18:21 1992
To: Brad Templeton <brad@looking.clarinet.com>
Cc: com-priv@psi.com
In-Reply-To: Your message of Sun, 05 Apr 92 16:06:26 -0700.
Date: Tue, 07 Apr 92 15:17:09 -0700
From: Dave Crocker <dcrocker@Mordor.Stanford.EDU>
Brad,
Such stochastic systems were a big moneysaver in the old days, but we're
talking about a world where the accounting systems, once written, can
take care of counting bytes over each circuit for each user, if they want
to, with not a lot more difficulty than any other form of counting.
The actual cost and overhead of accounting in a communications service
that does such things as per-call (or per-packet) charging is quite
high. (Computerization probably hurts more than it helps, because it
greatly increases our expectations. Without computers, we probably
would long-ago have started such things as stochastic charging...)
Getting the relevant hardware/software interface to count whatever
units you want is the easy part. The device needs to store the data
for some period of time (also relatively easy, depending upon what level
of data reliability and accuracy are demanded.)
Then the fun begins. Collecting the data from around the system and
correlating it into useful forms involves mind-numbing quantities of
data. Enough to be a significant percent of a communication service's
traffic.
Dave
