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Technology Stocks : Frank Coluccio Technology Forum - ASAP -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: Leeza Rodriguez who wrote (1084)	2/7/2000 5:41:00 PM
From: Frank A. Coluccio	Read Replies (4) \| Respond to of 1782

Leeza, there are always risks which surround the area of "billing" on the Internet. It is still not clear (to me, in any event) how things will evolve in the clash between the bandwidth mavens who would have all applications ride the crest of the optical tsunami, and those who would support a more traditional form of carrier guaranteed class of service and quality of service (cos/qos) model, with measured minutes of use (mou) and other attributes (x) which lend themselves to x-sensitive pricing. The foregoing are usually associated with deterministic services such as voice, live video, etc., but there are other considerations as well. There are those metrics which can be associated quite uniquely with emerging 'net-specific roles, such as authentication, policy based access and routing decisions, etc. But these are more often processes (historically, in any event) which have taken place on the "inside" of the end user's cloud, although sourcing these functions to trusted service providers is becoming more commonplace today, when the SP is acting in an agency role. ----- Getting back to the more familiar forms of deterministic traffic, however, where one camp suggests a tightly controlled and measured form of service, the other side calls for a form of flat rate postal delivery. That is, postal in the sense of any-port-to-any-port on the 'net, possibly tiered according to some "banding" scheme to take into account international areas and zoning, with ample (preferably, very high) bandwidth serving as the primary guarantor of suitable delivery, on an end-to-end basis. Personally, I think that the SPs and integrators who hope to be racking up the big enterprise contracts over their "transitional networks" with will find themselves obligated to take the qos/cos/mou route in the early going. This I feel is the case because serious-minded telecomm managers within enterprises (and smaller SPs/carriers who will be feeding off the larger wholesalers, as well) will not sacrifice on quality just for the sake of being able to say that they are sending their voice or fax, or whatever, over the 'net. Thus, there is a waiting, probably a growing, market for qualified platforms which can handle the tasks which have been ascribed to this vendor and others in their class. But this is not to suggest that as service providers improve their platforms and bandwidth becomes more ubiquitous and plentiful (cough!) that we may not see a trend in the opposite direction. That is, less dependence on QoS/CoS/mou, and a more liberal form of unencumbered packet exchange without special safeguard measures taking place. [[Some interesting studies and projections have been done showing how simply adding cheap incremental bandwidth could achieve higher levels f qos at costs which are lower than those needed to do resource reservations and the associated back office accounting functions, which are needed for deterministic channel provisioning and billing. But that might be for another discussion, unless you or anyone else here wants to pursue it.]] Another possible threat to any pure play billing system exists in the very operation support systems (OSSes) and elective add-ons which come stock from the factory with each of their vertically arranged network elements. Often, a major vendor will supply their own flavor of billing in these cases which are tied closely to the routing and switching fabrics within their own boxes. Where aggregation is of paramount importance, it would seem to me, would be when an ISP or NSP employs multiple vendors' wares, thus needs to roll up the traffic and billing statistics among them in a manner which is tailored to each customer's profile across the various platforms they are touched by. Makes sense? Anyone else like to comment on this topic? Regards, Frank