[members-discuss] Discuss Charging Scheme 2010

On Thu, 18 Jun 2009, Martin List-Petersen wrote:

> The product that the customer buys of the LIR should be giving more than
> 50 EUR/year revenue, if not, you might not be in business for long.
>
> Honestly this discussion is pretty much about chump change in the bigger
> scheme.

>From today onward it makes total sense to charge 50 or even 200 Euro per 
allocation - at least then the LIR knows the cost, the end user knows the 
cost.

>
> The ones that get hit are the ones that abused the PI scheme to not pay
> for PA or RIPE membership. For everyone else it's pretty much something
> that falls under the table. It's 4.17EUR/month per allocation. If you
> don't make that kindda money of your PI customers on top of your cost,
> your business isn't viable. And yeah .. you can just charge it on to
> them or eat the cost. Latter wouldn't make a difference to the customer
> as long as they are with you.

Here you hit the nail on the head.  Most ISPs will just pass the cost 
onward to the end user.  As you said - it is chump change.  And most of 
the 5000 LIR members don't even waste their manpower discussing this since 
the time spent is not worth the cost savings.

But not all LIRs are commercial ISPs - some are non-profits.  Back in the 
dark ages, before ISPs knew about multi-homing and BGP, ISOC-IL acted as a 
LIR and assigned ASNs to organizations needing multihoming in Israel. 
Dozens pre-1999.  ISOC-IL knew its RIPE membership fees and charged end 
users a one time fee for the allocations.  Only recently has the charging 
algorithm changed to include allocations dating back to 1992.

-Hank