doesn't save much. A possible countermeasure is to not count off-peak
traffic (or not as much). Our charging scheme works like that, but
our customers are mostly large campus networks,
This is similar to what some schools of economic study suggest in order to
achieve equilibrium while attempting to rationalize theoretical models that are
placed under stress. The problem here, of course, is that economists working on
theoretical models don't have to concern themselves with physics, whereas first
mile network providers do.
Instead of devising variations of schemes that are based on traffic averaging- or
95 percentiles (designed primarily for colocation- and IX Point situations),
access network providers must address customer facing bandwidth utilization and
provisioning issues, and while the issues of upstream transiting and peering are
related, they nonetheless are exogenous to the access network problem.
The main problem areas affecting the original poster's concerns over the ability
to send traffic in the upstream direction, as I see them:
[a] the nature and being of telcos' DSL and MSOs' cable modem asymmetrical
network designs, and,
[b] the unrealistic expectations that most stakeholders have (or the bill of
goods that have been successfully sold by incumbents to the community at large)
that suggests that an equitable exchange of money for services could be obtained
from a model that depends on entirely statistical probabilities.
The ultimate answer to this problem is a lot of discussions and subsequent
actions that will need to be taken. However, at the level of line granularity
that exists at the CO hub or head end terminal gear, the 95 percentile pricing
scheme is not relevant.
Frank A. Coluccio
DTI Consulting Inc.
212-587-8150 Office
347-526-6788 Mobile