If you're selling to end users, under promise and over deliver. Tell them 20Mbit but provision for 25. That way when they run their speedtest, they're delighted that they're getting more, instead of being disappointed and feeling screwed. In practice they will leave it idle most of the time anyway. This isn't a technical problem, it's just a matter of setting expectations and satisfying them. Some of the customers might be completely clueless, but if your goal is to make them happy, then explaining protocol overhead is probably not the right way. -Laszlo -----Original Message----- From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces@nanog.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Sorrels Sent: Friday, October 31, 2014 16:14 To: nanog@nanog.org Subject: Re: Industry standard bandwidth guarantee? And if you look at it from the provider's prospective, they have lots of customers who want 12 gallons of gas worth of driving time, but only want to pay for 11 gallons (or worse, went to "gasspeedtest.net" and it showed their purchased gas only gave them 10 gallons worth of driving time). Consider a better analogy from the provider side: A customer bakes a nice beautiful fruit cake for their Aunt Eddie in wilds of Saskatchewan. The cake is 10 kg - but they want to make sure it gets to Eddie properly, so they wrap it in foil, then bubble wrap, then put it in a box. They have this 10kg cake and 1kg of packaging to get it to up north. They then go to the ISP store to get it delivered - and are surprised, that to get it there, they have to pay to ship 11kg. But the cake is only 10kg! If they pay to ship 11kg for a 10kg cake, obviously the ISP is trying to screw them. The ISP should deliver the 10kg cake at the 10kg rate and eat the cost of the rest - no matter how many kg the packaging is or how much space they actually have on the delivery truck. And then the customer goes to the Internet to decry the nerve of the ISP for not explaining the concept of "packaging" up front and in big letters. "Why they should tell you - to ship 10kg, buy 11kg up front! Or better yet, they shouldn't calculate the box when weighing for shipping! I should pay for the contents and the wrapping, no matter how much it is, shouldn't even be considered! It's plain robbery. Harrumph". Jeff On 10/31/2014 6:02 AM, Joe Greco wrote:
That's fine as long as they're giving you a resource that can potentially transfer the 20Mbps.
That *is* a silly example.
A more proper analogy would be that you buy 12 gallons of gas, but the station only deposits 11 gallons in your tank because the pumps are operated by gasoline engines and they feel it is fine to count the number of gallons pulled out of their tank instead of the amount given to the customer.
Finding new ways to give the customer less while making it look like more has a long, proud history, yes.
... JG
-- Jeff Sorrels Network Administrator KanREN, Inc jlsorrels@kanren.net 785-856-9820, #2