Industry standard bandwidth guarantee?

Rafael Possamai rafael at gav.ufsc.br
Fri Oct 31 18:28:24 UTC 2014


I have a feeling this issue only occurs with residential customers, and
perhaps small businesses. It is most likely cheaper to over deliver in this
case then to maintain a larger call center and support team to attempt to
explain end users how TCP has limitations. No two large communication
businesses (ISP in this case) with properly educated technical people (i.e.
network engineers or similar) on both ends should start an argument on who
gets to cover transmission overhead (or for simplicity, the packaging on
the cake).



On Fri, Oct 31, 2014 at 11:56 AM, Laszlo Hanyecz <laszlo at heliacal.net>
wrote:

> If you're selling to end users, under promise and over deliver.  Tell them
> 20Mbit but provision for 25.  That way when they run their speedtest,
> they're delighted that they're getting more, instead of being disappointed
> and feeling screwed.  In practice they will leave it idle most of the time
> anyway.
> This isn't a technical problem, it's just a matter of setting expectations
> and satisfying them.  Some of the customers might be completely clueless,
> but if your goal is to make them happy, then explaining protocol overhead
> is
> probably not the right way.
>
> -Laszlo
>
>
> -----Original Message-----
> From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Jeff Sorrels
> Sent: Friday, October 31, 2014 16:14
> To: nanog at nanog.org
> Subject: Re: Industry standard bandwidth guarantee?
>
> And if you look at it from the provider's prospective, they have lots of
> customers who want 12 gallons of gas worth of driving time, but only
> want to pay for 11 gallons (or worse, went to "gasspeedtest.net" and it
> showed their purchased gas only gave them 10 gallons worth of driving
> time).
>
> Consider a better analogy from the provider side:  A customer bakes a
> nice beautiful fruit cake for their Aunt Eddie in wilds of
> Saskatchewan.   The cake is 10 kg - but they want to make sure it gets
> to Eddie properly, so they wrap it in foil, then bubble wrap, then put
> it in a box.  They have this 10kg cake and 1kg of packaging to get it to
> up north.  They then go to the ISP store to get it delivered - and are
> surprised, that to get it there, they have to pay to ship 11kg.  But the
> cake is only 10kg!  If they pay to ship 11kg for a 10kg cake, obviously
> the ISP is trying to screw them. The ISP should deliver the 10kg cake at
> the 10kg rate and eat the cost of the rest - no matter how many kg the
> packaging is or how much space they actually have on the delivery truck.
>
> And then the customer goes to the Internet to decry the nerve of the ISP
> for not explaining the concept of "packaging" up front and in big
> letters.  "Why they should tell you - to ship 10kg, buy 11kg up front!
> Or better yet, they shouldn't calculate the box when weighing for
> shipping! I should pay for the contents and the wrapping, no matter how
> much it is, shouldn't even be considered! It's plain robbery.  Harrumph".
>
> Jeff
>
> On 10/31/2014 6:02 AM, Joe Greco wrote:
> > That's fine as long as they're giving you a resource that can potentially
> > transfer the 20Mbps.
> >
> > That *is* a silly example.
> >
> > A more proper analogy would be that you buy 12 gallons of gas, but the
> > station only deposits 11 gallons in your tank because the pumps are
> > operated by gasoline engines and they feel it is fine to count the
> > number of gallons pulled out of their tank instead of the amount given
> > to the customer.
> >
> >
> > Finding new ways to give the customer less while making it look like more
> > has a long, proud history, yes.
> >
> > ... JG
>
> --
> Jeff Sorrels
> Network Administrator
> KanREN, Inc
> jlsorrels at kanren.net
> 785-856-9820, #2
>
>
>



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