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North American Network Operators Group Date Prev | Date Next | Date Index | Thread Index | Author Index | Historical Re: 95th Percentile again (was RE: C&W Peering Problem?)
On Sat, 2 Jun 2001, E.B. Dreger wrote: > > Date: Sat, 2 Jun 2001 17:28:52 -0400 > > From: Timothy Brown <[email protected]> > > > > As an interesting aside to this discussion, Digital Island bills for > > total traffic transmitted per month (in GB increments). Does anyone > > using them have any comments on this approach besides the obvious? Does > > anyone else do a similar deal? > > I only care to mention the obvious... this is essentially the same > type of billing as average-use total traffic billing. Total traffic > in + out, just not divided by number of days in a month. :-) > > I can't recall names, but I believe that several colo shops (space + > bandwidth, not carrier-neutral, a la Exodus) do this. Of course any system which bills for actual usage is pretty much statistically fair, regardless of whether its measured in the average of a rate or total amount sent/received. In my experience, people who bill in actual GB transfered tend to inflate it substantially to abuse those who can't do math, but there's nothing wrong with it as a system. I think people are more used to comparing price in $$$ per Mbit/sec though. $1 per gigabyte is equivalent to $316/Mbit fairly averaged. > IMHO, 95th percentile has its drawbacks. Sure, one can charge more > for "peaky" customers than with average-use billing, but that can > backfire in extreme cases: Recall when the Starr Report was > released... 5% of a month is 1.5 days, so the heavy traffic during > that time was simply "above the cutoff". I'm pretty sure they make out like bandits everytime there is a major spike like that. Maybe the absolute peak was shorter then 1.5 days, but 2 days later I'm sure there were still people hitting it enough to lock in a very good peak for that month. Unless the customer is specifically trying to game the system by bursting only for 4.9% worth and using inbound traffic to match, they pretty much always win. But I don't think that's unfair, if 95th percentile is the rules they wanna play by to make money off the unsuspecting then they should play by it for the plotting as well. :P -- Richard A Steenbergen <[email protected]> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)
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