Date: Sun, 11 Jun 2000 12:48:12 +0100 From: Tim Priebe <tim@polytechnic.edu.na> To: Luigi Rizzo <luigi@info.iet.unipi.it> Cc: Love Bug <Love@fil.net>, sthaug@nethelp.no, troy@picus.com, freebsd-isp@FreeBSD.ORG Subject: Re: LAN detection? Message-ID: <39437C7C.E664B33@polytechnic.edu.na> References: <200006110716.JAA10119@info.iet.unipi.it>
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Luigi Rizzo wrote: > > > We could parse the detail file for bytes delivered. Questions come to mind > > about information originating with our site, or from our proxy... Is it > > really fair to charge the same for this "cheap" bandwidth as well as for the > > "expensive" bandwidth? > > well, your proxy is also getting things from the outside... > certtainly you could differentiate charges based on source, but -glob- > accounting is gonna become a nightmare! I would generally agree with this, but with such expensive international traffic, this may be worth while, a few thoughts come to mind. 1) as this is dial and the ip addresses will be assigned dynamically, measurement of traffic flows by ip address will not lead to a simple evaluation of traffic used by a user. It would require corrilation of this data to the times and ipaddresses of individual users, and there will be some data that can not with certinty be assigned to a specific user. Does not seem practical to me. 2) If you have not already done this, enable transparent proxying of all data for port 80 outside your network. I know some people dislike such measures, but in a situation like this it is in everyone's best interest. This may cause some additional work if a list of exclusions need to be maintained, but it is probably worth the effort. 3) In order to get some measure of "cheap" and "expensive" traffic used by each user, set up a second proxy, which requires user authentication. The purpose of this is to allow you to do reports per user for "cheap" and "expensive" usage. 4) Decide on how much "expensive" traffic each user should be allowed before incuring additional charges. Write a script to analyse the radius logs to report all users, and thier usage. You can now subtract the cheap traffic through the second proxy from the total traffic. This gives you the result x. For brevity let z = the expensive traffic. y = x - z, traffic of unknown source. T = x * some percentage (factor to allow for some cheap traffic in unknown) + z * percentage of misses. If T is less than allowed expensive traffic, charge normal rate, else apply charges to excess data. 5) now advertise your new costing structures to users, and encourage them to use the new proxy for lower cost access. It is not simple, but should get your desired results. Users are encouraged to use your proxy, so you get higher hit rates, and cheap access is available at no additional cost. Your over users will most likely find a new isp, and low volume networks can dialup without you having to worry about it. If the over users happen to come back, because you are faster than the competition, it will be fine, as you will get the income to buy the additional bandwidth. Additionally you can discount the off peak traffic, to encourage large downloads at night. Good luck, Tim. To Unsubscribe: send mail to majordomo@FreeBSD.org with "unsubscribe freebsd-isp" in the body of the message
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