[ppml] Policy to help the little guys

[Danny McPherson]

On Mar 19, 2008, at 2:17 PM, William Herrin wrote:
>
> Hi Danny,
>
> I'm not a cost analyst but I have the advantage of having an
> award-winning cost analyst in the family. I asked him to vet the
> analysis for me. The short version of his answer is that my analysis
> uses appropriate methodology, so if the individual source numbers hold
> then so does the result.

I'm not saying it's not a worthwhile exercise, I'm simply
saying that for anyone that has attempted to compute the
cost of bit carriage on an IP packet network based on
distance carried, or destination network class (e.g., peer v.
customer), or class of service, or router platform redundancy
requirements, or rack space, or power consumption, or AC,
or amount of required resilience (e.g., SRLGs), access
platform redundancy, network management infrastructure,
much less OPEX, etc..., or been through similar pricing
models, it's just not that simple.

Adding global variables to this such as global routing
system interconnection denseness, degree of multi-homing,
churn(?), etc.. all have implications, as the number of paths
increase, which impacts all the previously stated resources,
and is mostly non-deterministic given the dynamics of the
routing system itself.

Put it this way, had I told our product management folks to
bill customers based strictly on the number of IPs they used,
rather than based on some algorithm that factors all OPEX
and CAPEX associated with service delivery, well, I know
where that would have ended :-)

-danny