charging for outbound SprintNet use

[Jeff.Ogden]

 Merit will be renewing its contract with SprintNet effective
 October 1st.  The new contract has somewhat better rates
 for day-time U.S. calls and is a little simpler to understand.
 We will be upgrading our 9.6Kbps links to SprintNet in Detroit
 and Ann Arbor to 19.2Kbps soon as well.
 
 Now that we know the SprintNet rates we need to establish the
 rates that Merit will charge people who use the SprintNet
 service. While it will take a bit of work to figure out
 the inbound rates, we know how we want to do this (we want to
 set the rates so that they fully recover both our direct and
 indirect costs of offering the SprintNet service). This is the
 same scheme we've been using to set the inbound rates for
 many years. The new inbound SprintNet rates will have just
 an hourly charge, but no packet charges (at least for U.S.
 calls, there may be packet charges for some calls from overseas).
 
 We also need to figure out what we want to do about charging for
 outbound calls from MichNet to SprintNet. About 1/3 of our 
 SprintNet sessions are outbound and right now we don't charge
 for this service at all. We've always wanted to charge for the
 service, but didn't have a way to do that until the Authorization
 Service became available last spring.
 
 It seems we have three alternatives (feel free to suggest others):
 
   1) Don't do anything. Outbound calls to SprintNet continue to
      be free.  They are free even to people who have no formal
      connection to Merit as members or affiliates now, since anyone
      coming in over a public dial-in line or anyone coming into
      Merit from the Internet can access SprintNet.
 
      I don't like this option. I don't think we should be offering
      a free service to everyone in the world. In the long run I
      think we will need to be able to control use from NSFNET/ANSNET
      that goes outbound to SprintNet so we can stay within the
      various Conditions of Use policies related to commercial use 
      (this isn't a problem yet, but could become one when commercial
      traffic can come into MichNet over NSFNET/ANSNET).
 
   2) We can deal with outbound charges much like we do for inbound
      SprintNet charges.  We'd charge a small per hour rate (probably
      about $1.50 an hour) to recover our costs.  This is the same
      rate we charge inbound calls making caller paid calls.
 
      This option is "fair" in that it deals with inbound and outbound
      use in the same way. It would require that everyone have 
      an authorization service account to which real money can be
      billed. If we go this route I think we are likely to see
      a large drop off in outbound use.
 
   3) We could require that people give an authorization service
      account to use the outbound SprintNet service from public
      and dial-in lines or the Internet, but not impose a per
      hour charge. This is a cross between option 1 and 2. It
      would limit use to people who have some formal
      relationship to Merit (as members or affiliates or as
      individuals who have purchased an authorization service
      account for a fixed montgly fee of either $10 or $35).
 
      This option is not "fair" in the sense that outbound
      users don't have to pay as much of the fixed costs of
      operating the SprintNet service as the inbound users do.
      This option is good in that it wouldn't disrupt people
      working from hardwired connections and it wouldn't
      require real money accounts to use SprintNet.
 
The bottom line here is that Merit is going to pay for all of
its SprintNet costs somehow. We'll either come up with a way to
bill it back to users or it will become overhead that in some
sense comes out of the member and affilite fees that we collect
or it will result in somewhat higher hourly rates to inbound
users as they pay more than their "fair" share.
 
I like option three myself.
 
We'll be getting a group of Merit staff members together to sort
this out in a week or two. We'd be happy to receive comments about
this from our members and affiliates. Please feel free to let
others in your organization know about these discussions and forward
their comments as well. Please reply to me (jogden@merit.edu or
313-936-2025) or to your site representative or to info@merit.edu.
 
Since outbound charges of any sort will be new, we'll need to
give substantial warning before we can begin imposing any sort
of charge. I don't expect that we could start charging for
outbound SprintNet use before sometime next spring.
 
On a related matter I think we need to drop our Autonet link
the next time it comes up for renewal. We need to warn users
well in advance. Autonet usage has been slowly dropping for a
long time now.
 
Finally it does not look as if Merit/MichNet will be linking to
the CompuServe network. Talks with CompuServe came to an end
about two months ago. 
 
    -Jeff Ogden
     Merit/MichNet
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