On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 08:52:47AM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
However the way you handle this is that you don't bill for flows whose accounting records you have lost, so you always err in favor of your customer. This gives you the right incentive to dimension your accounting infrastructure so that loss is minimized. As long as the loss rate is in the ballpark you showed, the lost revenue probably doesn't justify the effort (VIP upgrades) to fix this.
Simon.
That is nonsense.
Keep cool ..
If Burger King couldn't bill an average of 3% of their customers due to billing error, they'd raise their prices 3%. The net amount paid by their customers would still be the same and their total revenue would still be the same. They'd still be just as competitive. They'd just be billing based upon, you guessed it, statistical sampling.
Even if I lose 3% of all flows that does not mean that I also lose 3% of valuable data. It depends on which flows have been thrown away. In the worst case you may lose nearly 100%, in the best case you almost lose nothing. It would be interesting which algorithm is been chosen for throwing away flows. The observation I made years ago was that 30% - 40% of all IP accounting records just made up a few bytes. At that time disk space and computing power were more limited, so I decided to just throw them away. And I'm quite sure that our company did not lose one buck. Furthermore: you will never bill byte by byte. That means a customer has to pay x $ per Gig. If he used 2.1 Gig he has to pay for 3 Gig, if he used 2.9 Gig he also pays for 3 Gig. Of course the better you know what you are missing or discarding, the better your CFO will feel.
If you pay for it, you have to bill for it, somehow.
DS
-- Arnold