Industry standard bandwidth guarantee?

Thu Oct 30 18:21:00 UTC 2014

> On Oct 30, 2014, at 8:23 AM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
> On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 7:04 PM, Ben Sjoberg <bensjoberg at gmail.com> wrote:
> 
>> That 3Mb difference is probably just packet overhead + congestion
> 
> Yes...  however, that's actually an industry standard of implying
> higher performance than reality,  because end users don't care about
> the datagram overhead which their applications do not see they just
> want X  megabits of  real-world performance, and this industry would
> perhaps be better off if we called a link that can deliver at best 17
> Megabits of Goodput reliably a  "15 Megabit goodput +5 service"
> instead of calling it a "20 Megabit service"
> 
> Or at least appended a disclaimer   *"Real-world best case download
> performance: approximately  1.8 Megabytes per second"
> 
> 
> Subtracting overhead and quoting that instead of raw link speeds.
> But that's not the industry standard. I believe the industry standard
> is to provide the numerically highest performance number as is
> possible through best-case theoretical testing;   let the end user
> experience disappointment and explain the misunderstanding later.
> 
> End users also more concerned about their individual download rate on
> actual file transfers  and not  the total averaged aggregate
> throughput of the network of 10 users  or 10 streams downloading data
> simultaneously,    or characteristics transport protocols are
> concerned about such as fairness.

Not it’s not. All the link speeds are products of standards, be it SDH/SONET,
PDH, or various flavors of ethernet. They are objective numbers. What you are
advocating, given that much of the overhead is per packet/frame overhead
and will vary based on the application and packet size distribution, will create
more confusion than what we have today.

-dorian