End of the buffet line?: Narus offers a new way to bill for Internet services

How Internet access is billed may soon change. If Narus' new product takes off, then what was a Marxist's dream billing system-one flat rate for 18 hours of on-line time-may soon turn into a much more intuitive billing system.

The reasoning is simple. Different people have different needs, and depending on what people use-Internet protocol telephony, IP video or e-mail-Internet service providers need to be able to offer different kinds of services and different ranges of quality of service.

Sending e-mail and Web browsing "just scratches the surface," said Mark Stone, CEO of Narus. "We will have voice over IP and videoconferencing once bandwidth proliferates." And in this new world, uses and needs will not be equal.

To bill at different rates for different services, ISPs need to know what customers are doing-which is what has halted this sort of billing until now, according to Stone. Narus calls the intelligence that can determine this Semantic Traffic Analysis.

"ISPs need to know that it is an IP telephony call, a video call or a unified messaging session, and for the various sessions that an ISP cares about, it needs to know the information about the session," said Stone.

The Narus system reconstructs the session as it happens by placing a probe behind each point of presence in the ISP's network. That probe collects all the information as it passes, reconstructs it, then shuffles it off to a middleware package that facilitates the system and packages it into an Oracle 8 database, making the information usable.

Unlike other network analysis systems that reside within routers, the system works outside the network, allowing it to recreate sessions in real time without slowing down the network.

Frontier Global Center, the Web hosting and Internet service division of Frontier Communications, has been testing the Narus product. The company is using the solution to get usage statistics on its dial-up users. The company is looking into using it as a billing system for various enhanced services, said Jonathan Heiliger, senior vice president of Frontier Internet Ventures.

Because of the many service providers out there, "bandwidth is a commodity and companies are looking to get out of providing commodity services," Heiliger said. They need to differentiate themselves.

Within the next two years, Heiliger sees the ISP world charging a flat rate for basic services and adding on for premium transport and bandwidth services such as voice and video. "It won't get to the point where we are charging 2 cents for every e-mail message. People wouldn't put up with that. But we will charge for video," he said.

Narus considers billing as the last step in the process of changing the way that ISPs give access to systems. The most important thing for ISPs to do is to determine what their users are doing.

"The first step is to get base intelligence, and from there they can launch advanced services. Then they will start to capture the data for billing," said Stone.

This sort of information can be very important to ISPs looking to hone their networks, according to Ruth Chatterton, an Internet consultant with TeleChoice. But to start billing differently, there has to be a difference in quality of service, she said. Getting people to pay extra for services such as IP telephony and video will not be that hard because most users are already used to paying extra for those services, Chatterton said.

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