I meant any sales guy selling transit would "like to" ask for strict traffic ratios, while in reality, they don't actually do this. Your email is right on otherwise. I do believe that many transit offerings in the past and currently require some kind of strict traffic ratio to *some* companies. If you still don't think so, drop me an email offline and we can chat more about it. -dre

Thats a mighty fine crack pipe you're smoking from.

The majority of 95th percentile providers that I am aware of will charge you only for whatever is higher, inbound OR outbound (the notable exception to this being Exodus, who added in+out and THEN took 95th percentile, to extract every last penny from your pocket).

Infact depending on the provider you choose, you might even be able to strike some better deals based on your ratios. For example, rumor has it that Google struck a great deal with AboveNet because all their inbound traffic (from spidering) helped balance out AboveNet's peering links (I don't know if that story is accurate or not, but it has a ring of truth to it).

To my knowledge Cogent is the only provider who asks for traffic ratios on their transit connections. The reason? Probably because Cogent is already taking a massive massive loss on anything they must transit. Their only chance to make money at the end of the day is to get as much peering as quickly as possible (hence their buying spree of "hosed" companys who just happened to have lots of legacy peering), and since they are answerable to their peers for their ratios they must pass on those requirements to their customers.

It's interesting to note how much inbound traffic is "in demand" by hosting providers. With the breakup of @Home into many regional cable companies, most of whom havn't the slightest bit of clue how to build a network let alone a backbone, the traffic profiles change greatly. My prediction is that a lot of traffic which used to be peered into @Home at "major exchange points" will turn into transit connections from other providers. Unfortunately for the cable companies, the people who they could get the best deals from (the "mostly hosters") tend to be highly based around the "major exchange points" cities (to most efficiently pump traffic into the rest of the internet), not the "rest of the world".

-- 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)