On Thu, Apr 19, 2001 at 05:18:02PM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
I've looked at other ways and can't find any better. Billing based upon NetFlow, for example, is still statistical sampling since NetFlow loses a percentage of flows. For example, one of my VIP2-50's says:
So did you calculate, how much you are losing. It's less than 1% of a 1% of all flows. That means you catch up more than 99.99% of all flows. Not that bad. Furthermore NetFlow gives you the ability to offer value added (billing) services to your customers. For example ...
368351628 flows exported in 12278484 udp datagrams 33838 flows failed due to lack of export packet 269989 export packets were dropped enqueuing for the RP 108825 export packets were dropped due to IPC rate limiting
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'.
And you can't collect this data from interfaces because interface rates include local traffic, which (for example) grossly overbills customers with newsfeeds.
... you may easily deduct News traffic from being billed. BTW: tell me how do you exclude News Traffic if you count the 95th %ile? Billing based upon total bytes transferred is IMHO verfy fair and attractive from the point of a customer's view and tends to be a nightmare from an ISP's pespective especially if you don't just count bytes but are looking at the IP-addresses involved. Maybe a mixture of byte-counting and portspeed would give a fair billing model. BTW that's also the model you pay power for in Germany.
DS
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