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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: Transaction Based Settlements Encourage Waste (was Re: BBN /GTEI)
I think there are several issues here: 1. technical process for collecting/warehousing the data 2. business process for using it to bill 3. customer service process for educating customers on usage-based billing and handling the expected questions/disputes. 1. TECHNICAL: I think as we go to higher speeds, we need to see more netflow features on the router itself (maybe a netflow processing card to do some pre-export configurable aggregation). I haven't heard of any plans from Cisco in this direction, so we're still looking at (at least) one collector per major hub. 2. BUSINESS: This thread has already discussed several ways to present the data on a bill, from very detailed to not-so-detailed. I side with the not-so-detailed approach for now. 3. CUSTOMER SERVICE: Well, we know Telco's have huge billing and customer support infrastructures, so ISP's are bound to go there too. The issue is more of revenue per customer and scale: of course a telco with $10B+ revenue can spend $500M a year or more on billing support, but an ISP with only a couple $100M revenue will have a much tougher time, and may decide this is a only for premium customers at first. Cheers, -Lane On Thu, 27 Aug 1998 [email protected] wrote: > On 08/25/98 03:48:29 PM Sean M. Doran wrote: > > >> What about netflow ? > > > >[to Vadim Antonov who said that _metering_ traffic is intractable] > > > >Dear ISP - you have made an accounting error that I am able to demonstrate > >in my copious traffic logs. Please credit $x to my account. > > > >or > > > >Dear Customer - our copious traffic logs indicate that you generated x > traffic > >last month. Please pay $x net 30 days. Thank you. > > > >Dispute resolution -- it's fun! > > i think this point is the single largest barrier to doing proper billing. > isp billing needs to be as bullet-proof as telco/voice billing. i suspect > that with many isp's (and certainly from some of my past experience) if > customers would ever have disputed an invoice we wouldn't have had a leg to > stand on. i'm sure some providers have good billing systems but i know > many that don't yet they do some kind of usage based billing. > > also, as useful as netflow can be, at oc-3 speeds and higher the sheer > amount of data exported can be overwhelming both to routers and trunks (in > agreement with vadim). > > -brett > >
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