Home media servers, AUPs, and upstream bandwidth utilization.

Mon Dec 25 21:50:27 UTC 2006

Lionel Elie Mamane writes:
> On Mon, Dec 25, 2006 at 12:44:37AM +0000, Jeroen Massar wrote:
>> That said ISP's should simply have a package saying "50GiB/month
>> costs XX euros, 100GiB/month costs double" etc. As that covers what
>> their transits are charging them, nothing more, nothing less.

> I thought IP transit was mostly paid by "95% percentile highest speed
> over 5 minutes" or something like that these days? Meaning that ISP's
> costs are maximised if everyone maxes our their line for the same 6%
> of the time over the month (even if they don't do anything the rest of
> the time), and minimised if the usage pattern were nicely spread out?

Yes.  With Jeroen's suggestion, there's a risk that power-users'
consumption will only be reduced for off-peak hours, and then the ISP
doesn't save much.  A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak
traffic (or not as much).  Our charging scheme works like that, but
our customers are mostly large campus networks, and I don't know how
digestible this would be to retail ISP consumers.
-- 
Simon.