Major access changes coming this summer from Merit

Feb 1 03:52 UTC 1995

        While there is no truth to the rumor that Merit would be shutting
down all free access tomorrow, they will be making some major changes over
the summer, srw, danr, and I, learned today from Jeff Ogden, the Associate
Director for MichNet.  Instead of the current system, where anybody can
call Merit and connect to a machine at a Michnet affiliate without
having to have Merit authorization, Merit is going to be switching to a
rather complicated accounting system that will likely make things such as
the outgoing telnet capabilities on several of the gophers too expensive
for the Universities that own the gophers to keep operating them.
        Under the new system, anybody calling Merit will need
authorization (an ID and password provided by a Merit affiliate or bought
from Merit) Each Merit affiliate will have a certain number of "tokens,"
as Ogden calls them.  Each token will represent a modem, and an affiliate
can only authorize as many people at any given time as they have tokens. 
In other words, if an affiliate had, say, 100 tokens, they could give out
as many authorization accounts as they wanted, but once 100 people with
their accounts were using Merit at once, nobody else could get on with
that organization's authorization until one of the other users had logged
off, thus freeing up a token (and freeing up a modem in the process).
        "Tokens" will likely cost between $75 and $95 per month each,
depending on who's buying them.  Institutions will also get one token for
every modem and phone line that they pay for and put into the shared pool. 
Under the token system, an institution wanting to offer a public service
could buy tokens and provide an authorization account with a well known
password, if they wanted to.  That is to say that MSU *could* continue to
keep their gopher free for people to telnet through it, but it would cost
them more money than they're likely to want to pay for that.
        Grex, also, could buy tokens.  Grex could then provide an
authorization account (perhaps anon@cyberspace.org) with a really simple
password, a word like Grex, maybe, and people could call Merit and use
that for authorization.  If Grex had bought the tokens, Grex could control
what would be done with it.  If Grex wanted to be a really good semaritan,
Grex could make such an account work for access anywhere.  Grex would also
have the option (a much better option, IMHO) to restrict it so that people
using the Grex authorization account could only telnet to Grex.  If Grex
were going to do it, since it is not getting its connectivity through
Merit, it would probably be at the $95 per token per month rate.  This is a
bit expensive, but each token would allow one user at a time to access us
from anywhere in Michigan.

response 2 of 23:

Feb 1 05:51 UTC 1995

        If we were going to supply modems and lines for their pool, I
think we would also have to provide the connection between those modems
and the network.  If we're still using our 28.8K link at that point, I
really doubt Merit would consider a dialup line connected through that
link to be comperable to one of their regular dial up lines.  Still, it's
definately worth looking into whether we could find an acceptable way to
buy modems and lines for them without making the packets from those modems
go over our link. 
        Unfortunately, I had to leave before the meeting was over, so I
didn't get much of a chance to talk to Jeff about how this would
specifically relate to Grex.  The conversation about Merit access to Grex
was squeezed into a meeting about the HVCN.  Steve Weiss stayed longer
than I did, so he may have been able to get some more details.  Otherwise,
it's worth looking for more information on this.

response 4 of 23:

Feb 1 08:47 UTC 1995

   My god, what a complicated system.  It gladens some bizarre part of
my heart to know that the UM's concept of "funny money" that the MTS
computer system used starting in the late 60's is alive and well in the
world of the Internet.
   Gack.

response 6 of 23:

Feb 1 15:48 UTC 1995

I haven't had to figure out the new UMCE "subscribing" system on UM's
IFS system, but it looks very obscure. There is a two or three page
"explanation", which is very unclear, and no simple table of categories
and costs (at least, yet). In fact, it is rather like .....
software documentation!

response 8 of 23:

Feb 2 11:19 UTC 1995

If you have questions about the UMCE subscription stuff, you may as well
mail them to me.  As it happens, I ended up doing a bit of work on it,
so I actually know quite a bit about the internals, but you won't want
to know much about that level.  However, I also know something about the
rest of it, and more importantly, I know a lot about which people to
ask, so I can easily forward your query as needed if I can't make sense
of it.  But I don't think that actually has much to do with grex, so I
won't bore people further here.

I wouldn't even care to justify "tokens".  It is interesting, however,
that their price of $95 is somewhat higher than the $60/mo figure that
merit floated per-dial modem, which in turn is somewhat higher than the
figure we pay for our dial-in modems on grex.  Our operational expenses
are actually dirty cheap; essentially, the phone line--$20/mo or so.
Electricity and other maintenance is comparitively nothing.  The initial
capital expenses are also important, of course.  That's about
$200/modem, perhaps $60 for phoneline installation, per line, and then
some slice of the serial port & other logic to connect it to Grex.  The
current ports use the sun-3, but that's a solution that doesn't scale
very well, and is not well suited to the higher speed modems available
today.  So I'll instead worry about a separate terminal concentrator -
as it happens, the prices are somewhat comparable (so the exact approach
doesn't matter here.).  A new terminal concentrator, for 16 ports, lists
for $1500 (we think).  That works out to another $100 per port.  So, in
rough terms, that's $360 initial plus $20 run.  Or, in short, if we
installed new phone lines, they'd "pay" for themselves over merit in 9
months, and we could afford to upgrade the modem every 5 months
thereafter.  The reason they're cheaper for us is, we have no
administrative overhead (ie, we're all volunteer.)  On the other hand,
they're only useful in the ann arbor area.

Another component of the merit cost that I ignored is in fact the "merit
affiliate" fees.  But that figure is stiff enough that it may, in fact,
purchase isdn lines and allow us to locate terminal concentrators
elsewhere -- say, 16 lines in a^2, 16 in detroit.  If I remember right,
isdn is basically $30/mo - dirt cheap (if we still qualify for
residential isdn service.)  Then there's a $300 or so one time figure,
plus 2 isdn interfaces @ $500 or so each, plus (perhaps) one router at
$500.  That works out to $1800 as a one time capital expense, and it's
dirt cheap after that.

I'd hate to think of Grex *having* to set up its own michigan area
public dial-up network.  It would be a big drain on volunteer resources,
and it would be hard to do as good a job as Merit.  But, on the other
hand, it certainly seems like Merit has some huge administrative
overhead that we simply will never have.  The major cost for us is
technology, which will always be getting rapidly cheaper.  And, by using
volunteer labour, and by just not caring about some of the problems
Merit cares about, such as authentication and billing, it doesn't look
to me like Merit is that attractive a deal.

response 10 of 23:

Feb 2 17:01 UTC 1995

What is UMCE?  

response 12 of 23:

Feb 3 01:43 UTC 1995

        CCS lists external 14.4K GVC modems for $99.  These are good modems,
M-Net is running 17 of them and hasn't had to replace one yet.  We got our
first last April, and we've been all-14.4K since July.  14.4K modems
aren't expensive.

response 14 of 23:

Feb 3 18:59 UTC 1995

I've seen cheap-o external 14.4's for $75, and those not even from ultra-
cheap stores.  Even external 28.8's are under $200 a lot of places.  Of
course, quality is an important issue for Grex.  And I imagine Merit might
even require a specific model of incredibly expensive rack-mount modem.

response 16 of 23:

Feb 3 20:51 UTC 1995

   Choosing a modem for incoming use on Grex is always something to
worry about.  The fact that M-Net has had good luck with the GVC
units say some good things about them.

response 18 of 23:

Feb 6 06:20 UTC 1995

That's good to know about the USRs.  I was about to buy one.

response 20 of 23:

Feb 6 15:18 UTC 1995

   Yes, a V.34 ZyXel would be cool.  Unforunately, I think the GVC modei
are more realiztic.  And, hearing that we can set it into a dumb mode
via a hardware strap is even better.

response 22 of 23:

Mar 3 02:22 UTC 1995

how profound, ts.