[c-nsp] Rehosting a perpetual CSR1000V license

[Nick Hilliard]

Saku Ytti wrote on 24/07/2020 14:56:
> I've had few upgrades since LS1010+VXR network and there is a
> statistically relevant correlation to more bandwidth demand related to
> the upgrade cycles

For sure, everyone's bandwidth consumption has increased over the years 
and that's what's driven backhaul and last mile upgrades.  Even Granny 
uses Netflix these days.

None of these usage patterns would have been significantly impacted by a 
change in billing model in the longer term because the marginal cost per 
bit is low enough that any organisation attempting to charge per bit was 
undercut / outmaneuvered by other organisations who didn't.  It's only 
on very high cost services like airline IP that you end up paying per 
bit, but that's because it's pretty expensive to deliver that service to 
start with.

In the very early days of internet commercialisation, there was a case 
for per-use billing, but that was when people were using IGS for core 
and blended costs per meg for ip transit were hovering around the $250k 
mark, i.e. a not-insignificant portion of an organisation's annual 
turnover.  I was very happy to configure "no ip accounting".  And 
disable the per-connected-time accounting scripts for the dialup pool 
(€12.30 per hour in 1992, if you were wondering. POTS charges not included).

> if you cherry-pick the lowest 70% users.
This is the cost / billing model that most last-mile access providers 
use: send acceptable-use reminders to the top 0.5% of users rather than 
getting excited about the other 99.5% who are already costed into the 
model.  Then make your service quality reasonable enough that people 
don't ever need to call support.

Nick