News

Circular 3/98: JANET Network charges

1 March 1998

To: Heads of Institutions funded by the HEFCs or by the DENI

Copies: Information Services Directors of those Institutions

Usage-related Charges for the JANET Network

Introduction

1. On 22 September last, Dr Read wrote to institutions, describing the new charges which were expected to be introduced for use of JANET. At that time, a number of details remained to be finalised.

2. The purpose of this Circular is to announce formally that UKERNA will commence collecting the new charges on 1 August this year; to describe how they will be calculated and applied; and to address, as far as possible, the issues arising.

3. The charges will be based entirely on actual usage of the transatlantic lines and institutions may therefore be able to have considerable influence over their actual commitment. They are expected to raise up to £2 million, or some 11% of the Jisc networking budget, in the first year.

4. Given the current level of growth and distribution of usage, this would result in new charges to institutions in 1998/9 ranging from zero to about £100k, with a mean of about £15k; 23 institutions would pay £30k or more. Changes in behaviour might increase or reduce these charges.

Summary of how the charges will be implemented

UKERNA will count incoming traffic at the transatlantic gateway;
Each primary site will be billed, quarterly in arrears, for its incoming traffic passing that point;
Traffic will be charged at a lower rate (zero in the first year) between 0100-0600 hrs;
Traffic for the Jisc national services will be separately charged and re-imbursed;
Usage of the JANET National WWW Cache service will be free in the first year;
All other traffic will be billed to sites at 2 pence per Megabyte, including v.a.t.;
The HEFCE will, for the first two years, pay the bills of FE sites connected at up to 64Kbit/sec through the FE Connection Initiative;
The HEFCE will subsidise the usage charges for English HE institutions in the first year to the extent of £1 million; this represents a reduction of around half, compared with the charges indicated at para. 4 above, and further details will be announced shortly.
Primary sites will be responsible for usage by Sponsored and Proxy sites connected through them.

Background

5. For the past several years, traffic on JANET has been increasing at between 200% and 300% annually, with the strongest growth being found on the transatlantic lines. Although the costs of procuring lines have been falling, this dominant growth pattern has meant strongly increasing costs. In 1987-8, the cost of JANET was £2.56m. For 1998-9, it is £19.7m. The funding bodies have allowed such growing expenditure so as to provide JANET free at the point of use, and to encourage the development and exploitation of networking technologies.

6. Institutions have now had the opportunities to explore the advantages of the global Internet, and they are in a position to make judgements about its value to them. The Funding Councils consider it no longer appropriate to provide central funds to provide 100% funding for what appears to be an unlimited demand for networking service, particularly when that service is provided free, with no incentive to the end users to apply economies in its use.

7. However, the new charges will, at least in the first year, be modest in scale. The funding bodies have awarded the Jisc approximately the same level of funding for 1998/9 as for 1997/8. The charges will be aimed at collecting £2 million, as a contribution to the additional sums necessary to provide for growth in the coming year. That sum equates to about 80% of the cost of increasing the transatlantic bandwidth this year, or to about 10% of the overall network budget.

8. The Jisc fully intends to maintain the current level of central funding. It believes that only by so doing will it be able to continue to provide the excellent, co-ordinated national service which the community has enjoyed until now.

9. The level of charging in subsequent years will therefore depend on the level of growth. Some institutions may well be able to restrict growth without adverse effects, and so constrain their financial commitment.

Discussion of Charging Issues

General

10. The Jisc and its sub committees have consulted widely within the community about the best means of calculating charges; and although there is no overseas network with a similar configuration to our own, we have also taken into account the experiences in other countries where charging regimes exist.

11. We have concluded that there is no method which is without disadvantages; but the disadvantages which exist have not been sufficient to persuade the funding bodies that there should not be some financial cost attached to the use of scarce network resources.

Transatlantic traffic

12. At present, the scarcest and most relatively costly part of the network is the connection to North America. We also believe that it may be the traffic to and from North America which offers the greatest opportunities to introduce economies; and we have good reasons not to bring in charges which would harm the development of networking within the UK itself. As it happens, the configuration of JANET in any case offers an opportunity to measure traffic to and from North America with relative ease.

13. For all of these reasons, then, we have decided to charge for traffic on the transatlantic link only. It is possible that this position may change in future years; as one example, large year-on-year increases in transatlantic bandwidth will eventually necessitate large increases in domestic bandwidth; and, depending on the state of the market, this may affect the way in which charges should be calculated in future.

Incoming traffic

14. Currently, all of our international connections are of symmetric bandwidth; that is, the incoming and outgoing circuits are the same, because that is what the market has been able to provide. Our traffic is not, however, symmetric; the outgoing traffic on the transatlantic line is so much lower than the incoming traffic that the outgoing circuit is scarcely ever congested at all. It therefore makes sense to charge for incoming rather than outgoing traffic.

15. We are also conscious that charging for outgoing traffic would result in institutions being charged for providing resources which were used, for example, by academic communities overseas; we would not wish to discourage such provision.

16. We have therefore decided to charge only for incoming traffic. We are aware that there will thereby be possibilities for institutions to incur charges as a result of unsolicited traffic such as junk email. However, we believe that such traffic will account for only a small fraction of charges, and that it will tend to affect all institutions to a similar extent. We will, however, respond where there is evidence of exceptional distortions caused by unsolicited traffic.

Hours of day

17. Our transatlantic lines tend to be more heavily congested during the UK working day, and particularly where this overlaps with the US working day. By having a low rate charge for the quiet hours, we can encourage users to get more effective use from our existing resources by rescheduling their work, where possible; and we can reduce the difficulties for owners of "mirror" sites. There will therefore be a low-rate period, from 0100 to 0600 daily. For the first year, the charging rate for this period will be zero.

Level of charging detail

18. For purely practical reasons (the absolute amount of data required would be huge), UKERNA will not record details of individual transactions; it will merely increment counters for each institution. It follows that UKERNA will not be able to provide information on anything other than the total levels of traffic shifted; there will, for example, be no information on the remote sites from which the traffic was sent, either by network address or DNS name. Holders of Primary connections will be required to confirm the network numbers for which they are responsible.

19. UKERNA is hoping to offer, as an extra-cost option, the provision of invoices which are itemised down to the level of specified address ranges within sites. This system is currently being tested and it is hoped to provide further information by about the end of March.

Kinds of traffic which will be chargeable

19. All traffic coming across the transatlantic gateways will be counted and charged for. This includes traffic from almost all overseas destinations outside Europe. Because of the way peering arrangements operate with other networks, however, a small proportion of it will be from Europe, and a tiny amount from the UK itself. Under rare conditions, however, large amounts of traffic from, for example, Europe, may also flow across those gateways for short periods.

20. Those rare conditions would result from changes in the JANET routing arrangements known only to UKERNA. It is, therefore, effectively technically impossible for institutions to be able to tell, with complete accuracy, which incoming traffic will have attracted charges. Given that the resulting discrepancy will be very small, and proportionately applicable to all sites, and that sites are only being asked to pay for a low percentage of total network costs, we do not believe this to be an obstacle. It does not preclude sites from implementing controls on, and/or internal charges for, user traffic types which approximate to the traffic which will actually be charged for.

V.A.T.

21. JANET is a production service and attracts v.a.t. Network charges to institutions will also be subject to v.a.t. at the full rate.

Special Arrangements

Jisc National Services

22. The national services funded by the Jisc will be asked to identify the network numbers which are exclusively associated with the service, so that UKERNA can generate separate billing lines for usage by those services. Bills generated in this way will fall to be paid by the services but the Jisc assumes that it will need to provide additional grant funding to support that additional cost. This will enable the services to account more accurately for the true costs of their operations. The v.a.t. position is not affected.

JANET National WWW Cache

23. Usage of the national WWW Cache Service by institutions during this first year will be free of charge. We believe that this will be a powerful incentive to institutions to make use of the cache.

24. The national cache service is implementing a gradual roll-out programme, through which sites not currently making use of the service will be encouraged and helped to do so. The service will be writing to sites to outline this process.

25. Users will need to bear in mind that the national service is still to some extent experimental, and although the intention is to deliver a production service, the precise effects of substantially increased usage are hard to predict.

Practicalities

Charging Periods and Prediction of Commitment

29. Invoices will be sent out quarterly in arrears. That is, the first invoices issued will be in November 1998, for the preceding 3 months.

30. However, in order to give institutions early indication of the way their users' behaviour will be affecting their commitment, UKERNA will make available frequently updated data on current usage and charging implication.

Accuracy of charging data

31. The generation of the charging data by UKERNA will become part of the JANET S.L.A. and will be monitored by the Technical Advisory Unit.

Payment

32. Institutions will be charged for the full extent of the indicated chargeable traffic, and this charge will be payable in full within 14 days of the issue of the invoice.

33. The Jisc will consider reasonable evidence that charges have been materially affected by events not under the control of an institution, and will respond accordingly.

Contracts with UKERNA

34. There are no existing written contracts for the supply of network service, between UKERNA and HEIs. It has long been highly desirable that such contracts should exist for what is now a production service rather than the experimental project of a decade ago. They will now be implemented as part of the run-up to charging.

Non-payment

37. UKERNA will, in consultation with the Jisc, pursue outstanding debts in the usual way; and may, in exceptional cases, apply sanctions up to and including disconnection of the JANET service.