The Great Exchange

Thu May 28 02:30:36 UTC 1998

> In short, I see no economic basis for such metering, and no moves
> towards such metering. Maybe I'm wrong, but I doubt that we're going
> to see any change in this any time soon.

There is another reason why some people don't like metering - it 
makes predicting costs much more difficult.  Imagine your local library 
or university dept trying to budget for internet access.

I think I saw a comment that half the cost of a long distance call 
was collecting the data and processing the billing.  Can anybody 
verify that?

> I think it's a North American view of the world, unsurprising on NANOG
> :-) Traffic metering is the dominant charging mechanism for permanent
> connections in Oz and Connect differentiate traffic based on its
> source (domestic/cache/external).

How much trouble is it to collect the billing data?

What are the relative rates for domestic/cache/external?