All ISP's selling transit ask for strict traffic ratios.
How often do you think they get what they ask for? I
would guess not very often. People like flat rate 95th%
with no minimal commitment (both the seller and buyer)
because that's easy to keep track of. Simplicity is king,
again.
Cogent's deals were to make things easy, right?
I don't know what they charge, but anyone can see that
an offer like 100Mbps for $10,000 a month makes sense
in terms of simplicity (not saying it makes sense in
terms of a transit provider making any money, tho) ;>
-dre
Um, wha?
There are providers that will do "one-way" billing (charging less per Mb/s
in one direction than the other), but the majority of usage-based transit
services are sold without regard to which directino the highest traffic
goes.
Now peering, that's a different story. Peering partners, for better or for
worse, will get snippy if in/out traffic ratios are out of whack.
-C
Thats a mighty fine crack pipe you're smoking from.
The majority of 95th percentile providers that I am aware of will charge
you only for whatever is higher, inbound OR outbound (the notable
exception to this being Exodus, who added in+out and THEN took 95th
percentile, to extract every last penny from your pocket).
Infact depending on the provider you choose, you might even be able to
strike some better deals based on your ratios. For example, rumor has it
that Google struck a great deal with AboveNet because all their inbound
traffic (from spidering) helped balance out AboveNet's peering links (I
don't know if that story is accurate or not, but it has a ring of truth to
it).
To my knowledge Cogent is the only provider who asks for traffic ratios on
their transit connections. The reason? Probably because Cogent is already
taking a massive massive loss on anything they must transit. Their only
chance to make money at the end of the day is to get as much peering as
quickly as possible (hence their buying spree of "hosed" companys who just
happened to have lots of legacy peering), and since they are answerable to
their peers for their ratios they must pass on those requirements to their
customers.
It's interesting to note how much inbound traffic is "in demand" by
hosting providers. With the breakup of @Home into many regional cable
companies, most of whom havn't the slightest bit of clue how to build a
network let alone a backbone, the traffic profiles change greatly. My
prediction is that a lot of traffic which used to be peered into @Home at
"major exchange points" will turn into transit connections from other
providers. Unfortunately for the cable companies, the people who they
could get the best deals from (the "mostly hosters") tend to be highly
based around the "major exchange points" cities (to most efficiently pump
traffic into the rest of the internet), not the "rest of the world".