SnowWar, welcome to the forum.
Of course that's correct. The problem is that implementing it is way beyond the technical abilities of Telkoms corps of "highly qualified and experienced Cisco engineers."
Traffic is measured by a Radius accounting system hooked up to the PPPoE server. At that point, there is no way to determine where the packets are headed. To implement this properly, the Radius would need to measure at the points where traffic is separated between local peering through JINX, and the SAT3/SAFE cable system.
That causes a problem though, since at the routing point it is no longer possible to measure traffic "by username," as Telkom do, but the traffic must be measured by IP address.
Telkom would then need to compare records of who was leased which IP address at which point in time, with the traffic records in the Radius for each IP address.
That is opening a can of worms, since most South Africans go for the standard Marconi USB or ethernet modems, which have many firmware bugs and hardware problems, some of which allow malicious users to remotely disconnect the victim.
The attacker could then assign to himself the IP address of the person he just disconnected and download away until somebody realises what has happened.
As with the question of people stealing usernames from unprotected Marconi routers, neither Telkom nor the customer would be able to prove who is actually responsible for the usage, and the customer would end up losing out.
The other option would be to move the PPPoE servers right to the point of routing, so that the Radius server could determine which traffic is intended for an international route. However, that would mean condensing all ADSL users around the country into a single "virtual PoP", meaning we would all be strangling each other for bandwidth. That's a bad idea.
If every single user were to be allocated a static IP address, this could be made possible with the current network set-up, but that's not really on the cards either.
It would mean that Telkom would have to re-lease their netblock from the IANA under different terms. Currently, large netblocks for ISP perposes are allocated with the specific injunction that users must receive dynamic IP addresses by default. It does allow for users to lease static IPs at a slightly inflated rate, but that won't solve this problem.
Willie Viljoen
Web Developer
Adaptive Web Development
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