On Fri, Apr 20, 2001 at 12:33:01PM -0400, 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.

Another variant which is actually done by the big enterprise eWhatever companies with servers in multiple locations at a big colo provider is the 95th percentile monthly backup or db exchange. They'll push gigabit(s) between facilities for exactly under the mark where they'd have to pay for it, and they're not always nice enough to warn you before hand. For those colo providers, who have a model of dumping traffic out to peers locally and usually don't have a longhaul backbone capacity which is significantly larger then those "big" customer interfaces... Well you get the point. -- Richard A Steenbergen <ras@e-gerbil.net> http://www.e-gerbil.net/ras PGP Key ID: 0x138EA177 (67 29 D7 BC E8 18 3E DA B2 46 B3 D8 14 36 FE B6)