Subject: Re: [MOBILE-IP] AAA functionality

From: Patrice Calhoun <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 07:31:42 -0800

>    >Hmm. Visit Finland some time. Telia just starts providing Internet
>    >access for free, and there has been a smaller operator called NIC that
>    >has done that for a longer time. :-)
>    >Also professor Arto Karila from HUT stated last summer that it will be
>    >most probable that there will be much more free access providers by the
>    >end of the year here in Finland.
>    >The story is available in Finnish at:
>
>>http://www.wow.fi/WOW/17332438005461012486069354?path=tietotekniikka/juttu&document_id=125418
>
>    Perhaps finland is a special case. I wish that we had free access here in
>the
>    US :)
>
>I think access providers are finding that with bandwidth costing less
>and less, with increasing numbers of hot spots (which are paid for by
>the users regularily in these sites -- generally for a contracted
>price), ... that doing the accounting/billing/... to squeeze every
>last $/SEK/FIM/... out of users is not good economics.
>
>  a. Consider that the transit systems in a number of cities don't
>     have turnstiles -- but rather have patrols which spot check that the
>     riders have paid. The operator saves all the capital costs of the
>     turnstiles, the maintenance personnel required to keep them working,
>     the lost revenue when they don't work properly, ... -- and trades this
>     off for some lost revenue due to people riding who did not pay.
>
>  b. Consider that most major credit card companies have a certain
>     fraction of fraudulant transactions. They have learned that it is
>     not economical to decrease this below a certain rate (as the costs
>     to do so is greater than the loss of not doing so).
>
>In the case of cellular, Telia offers large customers the ability to
>have a site specific GSM service for which the customer pays a flat
>price per user. Thus there is no per call billing for all calls from
>these users in this specific area. The operator can easily calculated
>what the contract price for an N year period should be to provide this
>service for Y users. The customer periodically tells the operator who
>these Y users are to be. The result is wireless voice access for less
>cost (for the N years) that putting up a campus based cordless phone
>system.
>
>As Tom righly points out: the penalty for not allowing the grace period
>is a reduction in performance of the handover -- even for those who
>are paying!

This is where I am missing something. The *serial* and combined proposals
do not necessarily require that the AAA infrastructure. In fact, unless
an inter-domain hand-off is done, the AAA infrastructure is only contacted
when the keys are about to expire, and this can be arranged as to not interfere
with a hand-off.

So, what is your point?

PatC
>Chip

---

From: Gerald Maguire <[email-masked]>
Date: Wed, 19 Jan 2000 18:28:12 +0100

With lots of local cells operated by/for the specific
location/organization - there will be lots of inter-domain handoffs.
Just think of what happens when I walk down the street in Kista where
every building has a wireless LAN, but every other building is a
different domain - most would probably be willing to take my traffic
IFF when they walk into/by my building I will do the same. But as
these are different domains the AAA mechanism will be invoked for each
handoff.

Chip