The Great Exchange

Fri May 29 15:09:24 UTC 1998

Michael Shields wrote:

> > Perry E. Metzinger wrote ...
> 
> Can you back up your comment about metering requiring three times the
> current CPU capacity of routers?

As a router manufacturer i can assure you that keeping detailed
transfer records at today backbone's speeds is totally infeasible.
(I do not say impossible, but the equipment capable of doing that
doesn't exist, and would cost _at least_ two orders of magnitude
more than conventional routers).

Of course, someone may come up with schemes like the "cost counter"
in the packets, but why bother?

By and large the economic case for fine grained distance-sensitive
Internet service is non-existent.

--vadim

PS  If anyone wonders where i got cost estimate consider that full
    OC-12c produces about 250kpps, or about 25k flows/sec.  That
produces
    storage requirement at 0.5Mb / sec, or 43Gb / day.  For any
reasonable
    billing one have to keep records for at least a year.