From: rheiger@osnbe.Olivetti.ch (Richard H. E. Eiger)
Subject: Re: FAQ: connecting to Internet?
Organization: Olivetti (Schweiz) AG, Branch Office Berne
Distribution: ch.network, ch.chuug
Date: Fri, 31 Jul 1992 07:32:04 GMT

In article <1992Jul29.004121.1782@ifi.unizh.ch> lytras@avalon.physik.unizh.ch (Lytras Apostolos) writes:
>poole@chsun.chuug.ch (Simon Poole) writes:
>: [..lotsa HO deleted...]
>: One tendency is very visible: in the US the peering of networks 
>: is actively encouraged and practiced, in Europe a lot of forces 
>: are pushing exactly the opposite way (no amount of CEC money 
>                                        ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>: will compensate what European industry will loose due to this).
>  ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
>
>Right you are. In fact, we are just about to sleep again, when economic
>development is taking place...  (remember swiss watches before the hipper 
>plastic ones were invented? ) The depressing fact about this is that we been 
>there before, and I don't know if there will be another economic
>'super-hero' to get us out of that. (sorry, I really didn't mean to
>paint too pessimistic a picture... thanks to our farmers, we will always
>have enough to eat, of course.. ;-)
>
>--
>	 lytras@ifi.unizh.ch   		|   Apostolos Lytras
>	 lytras@avalon.physik.unizh.ch	|   Informatik Club der Uni
>	 lytras@amiga.physik.unizh.ch  	|   Zuerich, SysAdmin

My guess is that with the "Internet" we're going through the same problems
public networks like telex or telephone must have gone through in the early
days when it was very expensive to set up connections in a SVC with the
question who is paying for the service and how can the source (or dest.) of
the call be billed on safe grounds. Only due to gazillions of treaties and
stuff is it possible now to take advantage of the connectivity of the
telephone network, for instance (still at questionable cost, I might add).

The major differences between the public networks (telephone, telex etc.) that
I see are the following:

1) Connections on computer networks are not as strongly under the control of the
users, which makes it more difficult to relate cost to user actions.

2) There is no well defined authority to do the billing for services established
yet.

3) The only currently widely useful protocol (TCP/IP) is not ready to accomodate
for the number of nodes which eventually should be connected (like small sites
with maybe just a few nodes).

I have a few ideas:

Every node charges the previous one on the communication path for the service
provided. This gets propagated back to the source of the call. This way we
don't introduce a huge overhead for billing centers. We don't need complex
and treaties among a big number of participants, but only rather simple
agreements between the sites directly connected. Hence there will also only
be very few international treaties between bordering sites.

Ideally the sites can make enough money on the non connectivity services to
reduce the pure traffic (routing) costs close to zero. In my opinon the
connectivity is not potentially the most profitable service of the "Internet".

To accomodate for very small sites intermediate sites could have a few class
c networks with different subnetting schemes available (unless we could use
different subnet masks within the same network).

Just my 2 cents ...

	Richard

PS. These are my thoughts - they do not necesseraly correspond to my employers
ideas.
-- 
Richard H. E. Eiger
UNIX Competence Center		Switzerland	Phone +41 31 26 04 26
rheiger@osnbe.Olivetti.ch			FAX   +41 31 25 00 77
Olivetti	Steigerhubelstrasse 3	CH-3008 Bern
Newsgroups: ch.network