doesn't save much. A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak traffic (or not as much). Our charging scheme works like that, but our customers are mostly large campus networks,
This is similar to what some schools of economic study suggest in order to achieve equilibrium while attempting to rationalize theoretical models that are placed under stress. The problem here, of course, is that economists working on theoretical models don't have to concern themselves with physics, whereas first mile network providers do. Instead of devising variations of schemes that are based on traffic averaging- or 95 percentiles (designed primarily for colocation- and IX Point situations), access network providers must address customer facing bandwidth utilization and provisioning issues, and while the issues of upstream transiting and peering are related, they nonetheless are exogenous to the access network problem. The main problem areas affecting the original poster's concerns over the ability to send traffic in the upstream direction, as I see them: [a] the nature and being of telcos' DSL and MSOs' cable modem asymmetrical network designs, and, [b] the unrealistic expectations that most stakeholders have (or the bill of goods that have been successfully sold by incumbents to the community at large) that suggests that an equitable exchange of money for services could be obtained from a model that depends on entirely statistical probabilities. The ultimate answer to this problem is a lot of discussions and subsequent actions that will need to be taken. However, at the level of line granularity that exists at the CO hub or head end terminal gear, the 95 percentile pricing scheme is not relevant. Frank A. Coluccio DTI Consulting Inc. 212-587-8150 Office 347-526-6788 Mobile On Mon Dec 25 16:50 , Simon Leinen sent:
Lionel Elie Mamane writes:
On Mon, Dec 25, 2006 at 12:44:37AM +0000, Jeroen Massar wrote:
That said ISP's should simply have a package saying "50GiB/month costs XX euros, 100GiB/month costs double" etc. As that covers what their transits are charging them, nothing more, nothing less.
I thought IP transit was mostly paid by "95% percentile highest speed over 5 minutes" or something like that these days? Meaning that ISP's costs are maximised if everyone maxes our their line for the same 6% of the time over the month (even if they don't do anything the rest of the time), and minimised if the usage pattern were nicely spread out?
Yes. With Jeroen's suggestion, there's a risk that power-users' consumption will only be reduced for off-peak hours, and then the ISP doesn't save much. A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak traffic (or not as much). Our charging scheme works like that, but our customers are mostly large campus networks, and I don't know how digestible this would be to retail ISP consumers. -- Simon.