How to game the system (was Re: What does 95th %tile mean?)

Fri Apr 20 17:02:52 UTC 2001

One of the ways many providers accidentally protect against this is by
requiring a minimum commitment of 10 Mbps on 100 Mbps circuits and 100
Mbps on 1000 Mbps circuits.  By requiring 10% utilization they are still
statistically likely to make money on people who attempt to game the
system with a 5% duty cycle.  In large numbers, 100%/5% = 20 gamers/pipe,
20 x 10% = 200% revenue commitment for said pipe with 100% utilization.

On Fri, 20 Apr 2001, 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.
> 
> 	Lather, rinse, repeat with each TV show.  There's no incentive
> to buy a bundle of service and stream all the shows (more approximating
> continuous usage) from one place.
> 
> 	Fortunately this application is small, but if you were a
> web hoster you could do the same thing with multiple providers.  
> With 20 providers, you could move your bandwidth with that provider
> only 5% of the time, paying nothing for service with any of them.
> 
> -- 
> Leo Bicknell - bicknell at ufp.org
> Systems Engineer - Internetworking Engineer - CCIE 3440
> Read TMBG List - tmbg-list-request at tmbg.org, www.tmbg.org
> 

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