It's fine and dandy to bill for bandwidth for traffic on my network, but once it leaves my network, it gets tricky. For nine months, the big guys in the backbone game have been working together quietly to solve this problem, and new services should emerge in the coming year. The Narus system, for instance, places a probe behind each point of presence in a network, collecting information that is eventually packaged to an Oracle database. Because the system works outside the network, Narus says it can recreate these sessions for billing without slowing down the network. Frontier Global Center, a Web hosting and Internet service, has been experimenting with the system for billing enhanced services.
Solutions have to be flexible enough to allow for new technologies and services.
New products are just now coming out that will allow them to do this more easily. Having ISPs handle billing requires a degree of faith that makes some IT directors uncomfortable right now. Milano at Hitachi Metals America tracks his own network usage with Concord Network Health. Given the relatively embryonic nature of the Internet, analysts say that many users are leery of adopting new pricing models. IT managers negotiating bandwidth contracts shouldn't end the discussions with an ISP's salesperson, Mine says.