Industry standard bandwidth guarantee?

Fri Oct 31 19:09:30 UTC 2014

We get this with wireless carriers -- they ask for quote for a 100 Mbps
Ethernet circuit, and then tell us afterwards that it's 100 Mbps of goodput,
so we have to size it to 125 Mbps to cover all their one MPLS and two 802.1Q
tags and to past the RFC 2544 test at 64-byte frames.

Frank

-----Original Message-----
From: NANOG [mailto:nanog-bounces at nanog.org] On Behalf Of Bacon, Ricky (RJ)
Sent: Friday, October 31, 2014 11:50 AM
To: David Hofstee; nanog at nanog.org
Subject: RE: Industry standard bandwidth guarantee?

>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.

So if you tell a customer you are giving them 10 g of space for their email,
you shouldn't charge them for the storage taken up by each individual
email's headers.  Is that how it works though? Not so much I think. As long
as the pricing policy is consistent across the industry, and it is, then you
are not being ripped off.  Creating, implementing and maintaining a deep
dive billing systems to figure out how much of your traffic is packet header
and protocol and how much is your data would just add to operating expense
which would eventually be passed on to the customer. 

If you want a pipe that will let you transmit 10G of raw data, I can have
than implemented.  Just tell me where to connect the two ends.  If you want
to connect one end to our router or switch, we'll do that too, but it won't
get you much.  If you want to participate on the internet with a 10Gig link,
you are going to have to use protocols, and the data will have to be in
layer 3 packets, and they can be any kind you choose.  But you are
originating the request packets and receiving the reply packets and those
will include overhead.  We just transport them to and from the internet.  

In TCP protocol RxWinSize/RTT*8 is your theoretical protocol download
limitation in bits per second.  You will not exceed that unless you run
multiple sessions, and even then it will always be less than link speed,
which is your physical limit, how many bits you can receive in a second,
protocol or otherwise.