dial-in lines being held for days

[Richard_R.Moore]

In the past, MSU has strongly resisted any artifical limit on a user's connect
time.  In the long ago past, this was justified by the fact that the user paid
a connect charge, so if we had long periods of usage we could go out and buy
additional resources to handle that usage.  Currently, we still have some
people paying connect time, but many people just use our dial in services to
access other campus services and no connect time is charged.  Since we are
getting some general funds to support the dial in demand and since this usage
is still currently largely interactive access, we don't see the problem UoM is
having.

HOWEVER, i take this as an early warning that we MUST do something.  I believe
that, as was mentioned in one of the messages, people will use infinite
connection time as a cheap IP connection when running PPP. Actually, i have no
objection to people doing this -- as long as they pay for it! I would suggest
the following scheme: first - all PPP and SLIP access must be authorized. Then
we charge for connections, but on an increasing scale. For example, the first
four hours per day are free; the next four hours per day are charged at a
slight rate; the next four hours at a larger rate, and hours beyond that are
very heavily charged. AND we offer an alternative: a user may sign up for a
block rate, this rate would recover our costs for the phone line, modem, port
access, billing, etc. for the month. Essentually, but perhaps not actually,
the user would be buying the phone line access. The hourly costs would be such
that the users would be much better off if they bought our phone line instead
of using our "interactive" lines. If we wanted, we could even actually go out
and buy the line & give the user their own private phone number; that would
guarantee that they could always connect & never get a busy signal. Access to
that line could be controled by the authorization.

This way a user could still get an IP connection which they could leave
connected all the time so that they could get mail, etc., and such a
connection would still be relatively inexpensive - but no longer free.
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