Subject: Re: Flow spec conformance

From: braden (Bob Braden)
Date: Fri, 20 May 1994 15:38:07 -0700

Don,

It should be noted that there are a number of people today who pay
real $$ for Internet connectivity.  What kind of a guarantee do
they get?  Do they demand their money back when packets get dropped
or routing fails?

Presumably people the people who use predictive service will do
so because they get a bigger bang for their buck, at the cost
of occasional loss, compared to guaranteed service.  That may
be a bigger bang (less delay) or fewer bucks for the service.

I don't see any intrinsic problems with the economic model.  And
I think common carriers exaggerate the legal problems in offering
a less-than-perfect service to those who want better price-performance.

Bob

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From: John Wroclawski <[email-masked]>
Date: Fri, 20 May 1994 20:25:27 -0400

From: [email-masked] (Bob Braden)
   Don,

Bob,

These folks are by and large not paying by the packet.

Instead, they're paying for some higher-level notion of service; in
this case traditional best-effort IP.

There's an important point in there somewhere. As we move to a more
integrated communications infrastructure, it's crucial to make sure
that we don't lose this connection. Human factors engineering argues
that people should pay for some useful service they can relate to
directly, like "IP connectivity" or "high-quality delivery of that
movie", rather than some incomprehensible (to them) and unpredictable
low-level measure such as the number of packets delivered.

It is a wonderful and fortuitous circumstance that these higher-level
billing mechanisms also preserve the technical flexibility we need to
provide integrated services efficiently in a complex internetworked
world..

			-john