Notes

Outline

Complexity of Pricing Jon Crowcroft, jon@cs.ucl.ac.uk

Fairness and Assurance Fairness does not mean everyone pays the same price - it means If a subscriber pays more, they can relate the amount more that they get to the amount less other subscribers get Competition between providers is visible Fairness requires network enforcement (vis TCP games…..even with RED queues)

Fairness and Assurance, cont... Assurance about charges is a double edged sword too: You get what you pay for You don’t give away what wasn’t paid for Notion of “conservation” of QoS across boundaries of provisioning - I.e. commutative and associative $/bps

The business of networks There’s subscribers and providers - subscribers can be organised hierarchically, as can providers, and providers can peer too. There’s the classification of the unit of flow by source, destination, class of service or for QoS, by flow specification per unit charge time and time of day.

Assume we call log…. The complexity of call logging (and subsequent log processing) is a function of the granularity of the log (notion of class of user = me, my workstation, my department, my institute, my national net, or what)? Hierarchy can be exploited to reduce complexity at a point, but assurance and competition require global exposure of the I logs up and down the hierarchy.

Consequences If you support QoS, you need to do telephony style bills unless we can re-educate the accountants Argues that Class of Service may be better since lower utilisation is more than offset by the cheaper billing But then ISPs already did that to Telcos:-)