Re: What does 95th %tile mean?

[Arnold Nipper <arnold () nipper de>]

On Sat, Apr 21, 2001 at 08:52:47AM -0700, David Schwartz wrote:
> > However the way you handle this is that you don't bill for flows whose
> > accounting records you have lost, so you always err in favor of your
> > customer.  This gives you the right incentive to dimension your
> > accounting infrastructure so that loss is minimized.  As long as the
> > loss rate is in the ballpark you showed, the lost revenue probably
> > doesn't justify the effort (VIP upgrades) to fix this.
>
> > Simon.
>
>       That is nonsense.

Keep cool ..

>       If Burger King couldn't bill an average of 3% of their customers due to
> billing error, they'd raise their prices 3%. The net amount paid by their
> customers would still be the same and their total revenue would still be the
> same. They'd still be just as competitive. They'd just be billing based
> upon, you guessed it, statistical sampling.

Even if I lose 3% of all flows that does not mean that I also lose 3% of
valuable data. It depends on which flows have been thrown away. In the worst
case you may lose nearly 100%, in the best case you almost lose nothing. It
would be interesting which algorithm is been chosen for throwing away flows.

The observation I made years ago was that 30% - 40% of all IP accounting
records just made up a few bytes. At that time disk space and computing power
were more limited, so I decided to just throw them away. And I'm quite sure
that our company did not lose one buck.

Furthermore: you will never bill byte by byte. That means a customer has to
pay x $ per Gig. If he used 2.1 Gig he has to pay for 3 Gig, if he used 2.9 Gig
he also pays for 3 Gig.

Of course the better you know what you are missing or discarding, the better
your CFO will feel.

>       If you pay for it, you have to bill for it, somehow.
>
>       DS

--
Arnold