One of the ways many providers accidentally protect against this is by requiring a minimum commitment of 10 Mbps on 100 Mbps circuits and 100 Mbps on 1000 Mbps circuits. By requiring 10% utilization they are still statistically likely to make money on people who attempt to game the system with a 5% duty cycle. In large numbers, 100%/5% = 20 gamers/pipe, 20 x 10% = 200% revenue commitment for said pipe with 100% utilization. On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, Leo Bicknell wrote:
There is a much simpler game that costs the ISP a lot more money. Fortunately, it's not a common business model.
Let's say I am a TV network, and I want to simulcast a TV show once a week to the Internet. I might need 2-3 Gig of capacity during the simulcast, but the rest of the time I need none. So, I buy 95% service, stream for 4 hours a month, which is thrown away in any of the counting schemes put forth so far, and pay nothing.
Lather, rinse, repeat with each TV show. There's no incentive to buy a bundle of service and stream all the shows (more approximating continuous usage) from one place.
Fortunately this application is small, but if you were a web hoster you could do the same thing with multiple providers. With 20 providers, you could move your bandwidth with that provider only 5% of the time, paying nothing for service with any of them.
-- Leo Bicknell - bicknell@ufp.org Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440 Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request@tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
+------------------- H U R R I C A N E - E L E C T R I C -------------------+ | Mike Leber Direct Internet Connections Voice 510 580 4100 | | Hurricane Electric Web Hosting Colocation Fax 510 580 4151 | | mleber@he.net http://www.he.net | +---------------------------------------------------------------------------+