CS99I
Meeting 5 Notes: Paying for the web
Started by Gio Wiederhold,
27 February 2001.
Who gets paid for providing web services
Payment schemes also have to assure that all who are setlled with costs
are reimbursed.
- The vendor of information. Often the public expectation is that
information is free. However, valuable, or value-added information, that has higher quality, more precision and completeness, and wastes less of
the clients attention may well be worth paying for. Unfortunatly, convenient
payment schemes for the small amounts appropriate for snippets of
onfgormation have not found broad acceptance. Today (2000), the advertisement
model dominates.
- The vendor of goods: described as above. For goods the payments
are more substantial, so that credit card schemes are
acceptable.
- The Internet access services: The ISPs. The purchase bandwidth
from backbone transmission providers or other, larger ISPs. ISPs
oversubscribe, trusting statistical random behavior of their
customers. A large ISP will have multiple interconnections with a
backbone, and may also try to move much traffic internally. Major ISPs
are AOL, Earthlink, Mindspring, but there are a plethora of local ones as
Erols (DC area), WNET (Bay area), etc.
- The backbone providers: paid by the ISPs for long-distance
transit services. There is not just a single backbone, but many
suppliers (list to come). The original settlement among them was by
free Peering. There are now at least two tiers, as newer
companies enter the transmission provider market. Top tier providers
include UUnet (derived from UNIX-based intercomputer services), AT&T
(based on POTS transmission capabilities) now with cable TV lines from
TCI, Sprint (started with the Southern Pacific railroad right-of-way
for transmissions), MCI (an early POTS long-distance competitor to
AT&T), Cable&Wireless (of British origin, strong in Asia), PSI,
Worldcom (grown by mergers of ..). Closely following are Williams,
Letter3, Qwest, etc.
All of them have multiple interconnect points, and will add or close
interconnections as demand and their profitability mandates. Two
major interconnection points, freely available to all are MaeWest, in
the SanFrancisco Bay Are (where?) and MaeEast (Tysons Corner, VA, near
DC)
Moving service to the edge of the net
AKEMAI.
Notes
See
See also the references.