Industry standard bandwidth guarantee?

Thu Oct 30 19:11:53 UTC 2014

Hi,

> 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"

But you don't know what the user is going to do over the link. If the average packet size is very small the overhead will be much larger. And the path-MTU depends on many factors besides the customer link. The only real number to give to the customer is the raw link speed. Everything else depends on how the link is used. Giving customer numbers like "IF you do X then expect a maximum speed of Y" will only cause more confusion. Especially because you can only give theoretical maximums because real speeds depend on many other factors (pMTU, RTT, congestion somewhere etc) as well.

Cheers,
Sander