4 ms·

Interesting suggestion. I've often thought about this. What I hear (I'm not very knowledgeable in this field) is that somewhere up the chain, someone has to pa

by runeks 12y ago

Interesting suggestion. I've often thought about this. What I hear (I'm not very knowledgeable in this field) is that somewhere up the chain, someone has to pay for bandwidth (per GB) (can anyone confirm this?). But consumers prefer to know how much they will pay each month, and so they get that -- a flat rate service. So now we have a situation where a company's expenses are measured in GB of data transferred, and their customers pay proportional to their maximum transfer rate. This means the incentives of this company and its customers are not aligned. It's a bit like if you rent a car and the price you pay is proportional to the top speed of the car, but the expenses of the car hire company is proportional to how many miles you drive. Where I live, we're currently in the process of wiring up the apartment complex to FTTP (fiber to the buildings and copper from the basement up to the apartments). I'm in charge of the process, and I've thought about asking whether I can get an unlimited connection speed, but pay per GB. I haven't asked yet, but I think I might prefer this over a flat rate price per month. When I use the connection I pay, and it's blazingly fast, and when I don't use it it's free. Contrasted with being slow when I use it, and also paying when I don't use it.

wmf 12y ago
somewhere up the chain, someone has to pay for bandwidth (per GB) (can anyone confirm this?) No, wholesale transit is sold by bandwidth; e.g. a 10 Gbps pipe costs around $5,000/month regardless of usage. So now we have a situation where a company's expenses are measured in GB of data transferred, and their customers pay proportional to their maximum transfer rate. This means the incentives of this company and its customers are not aligned. More like the ISP's expenses are proportional to aggregate peak demand, but yeah, it's not aligned.
- runeks 12y ago
  > No, wholesale transit is sold by bandwidth; e.g. a 10 Gbps pipe costs around $5,000/month regardless of usage. When I went around asking for a price for a shared connection to out apartment complex, I was asked how many tenants we had. And the reason -- I was told -- that they asked for this, was that the more tenants the more traffic consumed. So it seems to me that somewhere, someone is paying for traffic. Or else I don't understand.
  - wmf 12y ago
    If you want to buy x Gbps no questions asked, that is definitely a service that exists. It sounds like you were dealing with retail-level sales people and you weren't clear about what you want to buy so they're trying to help you figure it out.
  - vidarh 12y ago
    End user ISPs often charge by traffic. But buying transit from larger ISP for colocation or to operate your own ISP for example, is typically done based on some combination of port speed, committed information rate (CIR) and peak usage within a defined interval (burst). For example, at work we pay abour $6 per Mbps 95th percentile use averaged per 5 minutes, with a 10Mbps CIR and 100Mbps port speed at one of our data centres. This means we always pay for at least 10Mbps. Our ISP then measures our traffic and averages it over 5 minute intervals. They then throw away the top 5% of samples (so we can have short traffic spikes up to our port speed without paying extra), and we pay for the higher of 10Mbps and the next sample. Any bandwidth above the CIR is entirely dependent on whether or not our ISP has spare capacity. The higher your requested port speed, the less likely you are of being able to burst much more than your CIR - any halfway decent provider will have 90Mbps excess capacity much of the time, so paying for 10Mbps CIR and bursting to 100Mbps is not unlikely, but paying for 1Gbps and being able to burst to 10Gbps gets far more dicy. At some higher speeds some providers will only offer links where CIR == port speed - effectively a "unlimited" connection. If you know your bandwidth exceeds the CIR a lot of the time, you will typically want to pay for a higher CIR for the reason that you otherwise risk getting throttled even if your port speed is higher and your connection in theory is burstable. Effectively the sum of the CIR of their customers + some margin is what the ISP will turn around and contract with their transit providers and peering partners for. If other customers don't use their CIR, and your CIR is lower than your port speed, your ISP is likely to let you burst (at a cost) that moment, but traffic within the CIR (should) always have priority.
pas 12y ago
Virtual Servers come with some TeraBytes per month. AWS and Google Compute Engine counts traffic by the GigaByte. Most upstream providers at colocation facilities use 95th percentile pricing, that is you have a gigabit link, or a 10g link, and every 5 minutes they take a sample of current speed, and then at the end of the month they sort those samples and take the sample at the "95th percentile", which can be understood as link utilization discarding bursts which, gives a speed, which you can multiply by the length of the month, and you get transferred bytes (or octets as network/telco people like to call it). A 100Mbps link is ~30 TB per month. If you do business on the internet, the moment you get big enough, you can negotiate these prices. Just buying a gigabit ethernet port is not even that expensive ( https://ams-ix.net/services-pricing/pricing https://ams-ix.net/services-pricing/pricing ), but this is without peering, and you have to either deal with every non-open partner there ( https://ams-ix.net/connected_parties https://ams-ix.net/connected_parties ) or get transit from someone who has a full coverage of the internet. (That is all the prefixes assigned by local internet registries are reachable via them.)
- thefreeman 12y ago
  Just a follow up to your 95 percentile rule, there is a famous story of Google exploiting this (in the early days before they were flush with money) in order to transfer their data to a new data center on the opposite coast. http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-caper.html http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-cap...

by runeks 12y ago

wmf 12y ago

somewhere up the chain, someone has to pay for bandwidth (per GB) (can anyone confirm this?) No, wholesale transit is sold by bandwidth; e.g. a 10 Gbps pipe costs around $5,000/month regardless of usage. So now we have a situation where a company's expenses are measured in GB of data transferred, and their customers pay proportional to their maximum transfer rate. This means the incentives of this company and its customers are not aligned. More like the ISP's expenses are proportional to aggregate peak demand, but yeah, it's not aligned.

runeks 12y ago
> No, wholesale transit is sold by bandwidth; e.g. a 10 Gbps pipe costs around $5,000/month regardless of usage. When I went around asking for a price for a shared connection to out apartment complex, I was asked how many tenants we had. And the reason -- I was told -- that they asked for this, was that the more tenants the more traffic consumed. So it seems to me that somewhere, someone is paying for traffic. Or else I don't understand.
- wmf 12y ago
  If you want to buy x Gbps no questions asked, that is definitely a service that exists. It sounds like you were dealing with retail-level sales people and you weren't clear about what you want to buy so they're trying to help you figure it out.
- vidarh 12y ago
  End user ISPs often charge by traffic. But buying transit from larger ISP for colocation or to operate your own ISP for example, is typically done based on some combination of port speed, committed information rate (CIR) and peak usage within a defined interval (burst). For example, at work we pay abour $6 per Mbps 95th percentile use averaged per 5 minutes, with a 10Mbps CIR and 100Mbps port speed at one of our data centres. This means we always pay for at least 10Mbps. Our ISP then measures our traffic and averages it over 5 minute intervals. They then throw away the top 5% of samples (so we can have short traffic spikes up to our port speed without paying extra), and we pay for the higher of 10Mbps and the next sample. Any bandwidth above the CIR is entirely dependent on whether or not our ISP has spare capacity. The higher your requested port speed, the less likely you are of being able to burst much more than your CIR - any halfway decent provider will have 90Mbps excess capacity much of the time, so paying for 10Mbps CIR and bursting to 100Mbps is not unlikely, but paying for 1Gbps and being able to burst to 10Gbps gets far more dicy. At some higher speeds some providers will only offer links where CIR == port speed - effectively a "unlimited" connection. If you know your bandwidth exceeds the CIR a lot of the time, you will typically want to pay for a higher CIR for the reason that you otherwise risk getting throttled even if your port speed is higher and your connection in theory is burstable. Effectively the sum of the CIR of their customers + some margin is what the ISP will turn around and contract with their transit providers and peering partners for. If other customers don't use their CIR, and your CIR is lower than your port speed, your ISP is likely to let you burst (at a cost) that moment, but traffic within the CIR (should) always have priority.

pas 12y ago

Virtual Servers come with some TeraBytes per month. AWS and Google Compute Engine counts traffic by the GigaByte. Most upstream providers at colocation facilities use 95th percentile pricing, that is you have a gigabit link, or a 10g link, and every 5 minutes they take a sample of current speed, and then at the end of the month they sort those samples and take the sample at the "95th percentile", which can be understood as link utilization discarding bursts which, gives a speed, which you can multiply by the length of the month, and you get transferred bytes (or octets as network/telco people like to call it). A 100Mbps link is ~30 TB per month. If you do business on the internet, the moment you get big enough, you can negotiate these prices. Just buying a gigabit ethernet port is not even that expensive ( https://ams-ix.net/services-pricing/pricing https://ams-ix.net/services-pricing/pricing ), but this is without peering, and you have to either deal with every non-open partner there ( https://ams-ix.net/connected_parties https://ams-ix.net/connected_parties ) or get transit from someone who has a full coverage of the internet. (That is all the prefixes assigned by local internet registries are reachable via them.)

thefreeman 12y ago
Just a follow up to your 95 percentile rule, there is a famous story of Google exploiting this (in the early days before they were flush with money) in order to transfer their data to a new data center on the opposite coast. http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-caper.html http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-cap...