Providing Managed Services to End-Users

Abstract

End-users, whether at home, within an enterprise, or mobile, require managed Internet services, specially in a model, where Internet Service Providers (ISP) are characterized as service sellers and end-users as service buyers. Today, ISPs acting in similar roles (seller/buyer) establish peering agreements between them to manage services. Can these schemes developed for managing inter-ISP services be extended to managing Internet services to large numbers of end-users?

Today, Internet service provisioning determines a market, where legal contracts between users and providers are essential. Effective and efficient combinations of fine-grained monitoring and charging functions are a key to successful service provisioning for endusers. However, it is not clear how these functions will be provided in technical and economical terms.

The panel will discuss a number of open issues:

• Do we need managed services for end-users, especially including charged services?

• Is there a need to charge differently for different services?

• How fine-grained can efficient monitoring be?

• What are the types of technical parameters, such as bandwidth, error rates, and delay, which can be used for pricing services?

• How can service level agreements be specified within a contract so that they can be monitored and enforced by both the seller and the buyer?

The goal of this panel will be to develop an understanding of issues and approaches for the support of Ineternet services from the perspective of a large set of end-users.