North American Network Operators Group

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RE: What does 95th %tile mean?

  • From: Geoff Huston
  • Date: Thu Apr 19 20:45:29 2001

At 4/20/01 10:18 AM, David Schwartz wrote:
        Billing based upon total bytes transferred tends to create similar
problems. Do you bill based upon bytes transferred per day? Per month? If
so, it's still statistical sampling if you have some amount of 'paid
bandwidth'.
I think its the last part of this statement about 'paid bandwidth' which is the bit that may make your statistical sampling comment , but I'm unsure if your 'paid bandwidth' is the same as the one thats in my head.


In general (minus 'paid bandwidth' and taking the view that all bytes passed between the customer and the provider have the same billable value) byte transferred systems are more reliable if you take as your yardstick of 'reliability' that the same algorithm applied to the same raw data should yield the same result. As long as both parties can agree (precisely) when the measurement interval starts and stops, of course.

Of course if you then want to complicate the picture by attaching different billing rates to different packets, then once more the complexity rises and the accuracy tends to drop.