Re: Customer oversubscription levels

[Brian <bri () sonicboom org>]

Got to think most customers assume oversubscription.  Having been on the
provider end of this in a previous life, how it often goes is like
this.  The customer will think/feel they are not getting what they are
paying for.  As a result the customer will deliberately try to peg their
ckt at the bw you say you are selling them, and if they cannot achieve it,
they call you and complain.  You at that point need to fix it or risk
losing the customer.  As you sell higher and higher bandwidth rates, the
customer's tolerance, presumably because of what they are paying you, goes
down.

        Brian

On Tue, 28 May 2002, Mathew Lodge wrote:

> This might be a dumb question, but I can be sure that I'll be told if
> that's the case, so here goes:
>
> What's a good oversubscription ratio for customer traffic to global
> Internet bandwidth these days? I.e., if you have, say 90megs of bandwidth
> to other transit providers, how much bandwidth, in aggregate, are you
> selling to customers -- 90? 450? 900?
>
> Do customers care about this? Or do they assume that if they get a T1 to
> the Internet from you that they have their own T1's worth of non
> over-subscribed bandwidth to your transit providers?
>
> Thanks,
>
> Mathew