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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: What does 95th %tile mean?
On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 08:52:47AM -0700, David Schwartz wrote: > > > > However the way you handle this is that you don't bill for flows whose > > accounting records you have lost, so you always err in favor of your > > customer. This gives you the right incentive to dimension your > > accounting infrastructure so that loss is minimized. As long as the > > loss rate is in the ballpark you showed, the lost revenue probably > > doesn't justify the effort (VIP upgrades) to fix this. > > > Simon. > > That is nonsense. > Keep cool .. > If Burger King couldn't bill an average of 3% of their customers due to > billing error, they'd raise their prices 3%. The net amount paid by their > customers would still be the same and their total revenue would still be the > same. They'd still be just as competitive. They'd just be billing based > upon, you guessed it, statistical sampling. > Even if I lose 3% of all flows that does not mean that I also lose 3% of valuable data. It depends on which flows have been thrown away. In the worst case you may lose nearly 100%, in the best case you almost lose nothing. It would be interesting which algorithm is been chosen for throwing away flows. The observation I made years ago was that 30% - 40% of all IP accounting records just made up a few bytes. At that time disk space and computing power were more limited, so I decided to just throw them away. And I'm quite sure that our company did not lose one buck. Furthermore: you will never bill byte by byte. That means a customer has to pay x $ per Gig. If he used 2.1 Gig he has to pay for 3 Gig, if he used 2.9 Gig he also pays for 3 Gig. Of course the better you know what you are missing or discarding, the better your CFO will feel. > If you pay for it, you have to bill for it, somehow. > > DS > > > -- Arnold
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