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> 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 sh

by 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.

by runeks 12y ago

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.