On Thu, 19 April 2001, Greg A. Woods wrote:
From the provider's perspective this doesn't really matter a whole lot and they can reduce the effect of your bursts on their other customers by simply narrowing their window. There's no need to do silly sliding windows, multiple windows, etc. -- the averages are just fine.
From a provider's perspective it does matter. The most costly part of any network is the last 1% because most of the fixed cost of the network is based on the peak capacity, not average capacity. Billing based on average usage works best if you have a large population and excess capacity. Generally its the largest of the large customers who have the most to gain by gaming the system. A few T1 customers gaming the system is just noise.
But you might have an OC48 customer who pegs their link requiring you to add more peak capacity to your network. But times their traffic, so their average usage never exceeds an OC24, and pays the average price. This is the type of customer which nailed the electric companies. If you can save tens of thousands dollars by starting an electric smelter at 30 minutes past the hour instead of exactly on the hour, its noticable. The electric companies reserve their fanciest meters for large power consumers like smelters and colo providers :-) This was fine in the past, when we were doubling the Internet's capacity every X days. I have a feeling providers will start managing/reducing the excess capacity headroom in their networks. And will start looking at ways to wring more money out of their current customers. Some rocket science accountant somewhere should be working on a way to maximize the chargable usage by just shifting the window bins back and forth until he finds the maximum. Is there any commercial provider not trying to maximize billable usage? By carefully choosing window bins, a provider could generate 1%, 25%, 50% more revenue across all his usage-based customers. And if you got this idea from me, I expect 5% of the take....