What does 95th %tile mean?

Thu Apr 19 19:06:39 UTC 2001

I know one company in Europe that uses the in + out model.

Thomas

----- Original Message ----- 
From: "Alex Rubenstein" <alex at corp.nac.net>
To: <nanog at merit.edu>
Sent: Thursday, April 19, 2001 10:09 AM
Subject: What does 95th %tile mean?

> 
> I've gotten myself into an argument with a provider about the definition of
> 'industry-standard 95th percentile method.'
> 
> To me, this means the following:
> 
> a) take the number of bytes xfered over a 5 minute period, and determine
> rate for both the inbound and outbound. Store this in your favorite
> data-store.
> 
> b) at billing time, presumably on the first of the month or some other
> monthly increment, take all the samples, sort them from greatest to least,
> hacking off the top 5% of samples. Actually, this is done twice, once for
> inbound, once for outbound. Then, take the higher of those two, and multiply
> it by your favorite $ multiple (ie, $500 per megabit per second, or $1 per
> kilobit per second, etc).
> 
> I think that most people agree with the above; the issue we are running into
> is one rogue provider who is billing this at in + out, not the greater of in
> or out.
> 
> How is everyone else doing it? Specifically, larger folks (UU, Sprint, CW,
> Exodus/FGC, GX, Qwest, L3)
> 
> Thanks!
> 