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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Metered IP billing is indeed possible
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
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