On Sat, Jun 02, 2001 at 11:59:17PM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
Sometimes what happens in this case is the customer or the provider realize that this particular traffic pattern does not match the statistical sample on which the billing was based. Richard Steenbergen told me a story about a company that colocated all their servers at POPs of the same provider and paid twice for traffic between their machines. Needless to say, they had to negotiate new pricing. Why? Because their traffic pattern made the statistical sampling upon which their billing was based inappropriate.
With IP you can't say who has to pay for traffic. Sender or recievier. Therefore you bill both. With what we called multi-POP customers you surely have to take care as those customers don't want to pay for traffic twice. But it's not so difficult to implement this into your billing system.
If a billing scheme were not based upon statistical sampling, it would
Once again: five-minute-bandwidth-average nor counting bytes is "statistical sampling". Don't mix up definitions. There is a well founded theory of statistical sampling. But that does not apply to what we are talking about. But of course each measurement is error proned. And "quality providers" tell their customers how accurate their accountings are. -- Arnold