----- Original Message -----
From: "Adam Armstrong" <lists@memetic.org>
I'm more interested in the levels of traffic that we will see consistently.
You're planning to engage in Statistical Multiplexing, or what I've always termed "bandwidth surfing": how hard can I oversubscribe my uplink without pissing off the paying customers? As others have suggested, it depends on quite a number of things, primarily: whether you're offering an SLA to the customers or not. Whether you have a caching proxy or not and which CDNs you solicit to provision your node are also big factors, of course. In the final analysis, though, it depends on the customer class. Residence customers will tolerate a lot more oversubscription than business, enterprise, and server going on down the list of oversubscription, but happily *up* the list of "how much can I charge". Remember that QoS and load shaping don't work all that will across the internet at large, but they work pretty decently inside a single switch; you can prioritize customers who are willing to pay extra for it. The problem is similar to airline bookings; it is possible, in the immortal words of Dave Barry, to envision a situation -- this will happen in your lifetime -- where no two customers pay exactly the same price. :-) Cheers, -- jra -- Jay R. Ashworth Baylink jra@baylink.com Designer The Things I Think RFC 2100 Ashworth & Associates http://baylink.pitas.com 2000 Land Rover DII St Petersburg FL USA http://photo.imageinc.us +1 727 647 1274