Burstable billing is a method of measuring bandwidth based on peak utilization. It also allows usage to exceed a specified
threshold for brief periods of time without the financial penalty of purchasing a higher Committed Information Rate (CIR, "commitment")
from an Internet service provider (ISP). Most ISPs use a five minute sampling and 95% utilization when calculating usage.
Burstable Billing - 95th Percentile
The 95th percentile is a widely used mathematical calculation to evaluate the regular and sustained utilization of a network connection.
The 95th percentile method more closely reflects the needed capacity of the link in question than tracking by other methods such as mean
or maximum rate. The bytes that make up the packets themselves do not actually cost money, but the link and the infrastructure on either
end of the link cost money to set up and support. This method of billing is commonly used in peering arrangements between corporate networks,
it is not often used by ISP's because Internet Service Providers need CIRs (Committed Information Rates) for planning purposes.
Since most networks are Oversubscribed, there is often some room for some bursting without advanced planning (hence "Burstable billing").
Ignoring the top 5% of the samples is a reasonable compromise in most cases (hence 95th percentile).
Many sites have the majority of their traffic on Mondays, so the Monday traffic determines the rate for the whole month. Some providers
offer billing on the 90th percentile as an incentive to attract customers with irregular bandwidth patterns.
The 95th percentile allows a customer to have a short (less than 36 hours total for the month) burst in traffic without overage charges.
Basically the 95th percentile says that 95% of the time, the usage is at or below this amount. Conversely, 5% of the samples are bursting
above this rate.
There are important factors to percentile calculation:
Sampling interval, or how often samples are taken (called also "data points").
- A percentile is calculated on some set of data points.
- Every data point represents the average bandwidth used during the sampling interval (e.g., five minutes) and is calculated as the number
of bits transferred throughout the interval divided by the duration of the interval (e.g., 300 seconds). The resulting value represents the
average utilization rate for a single sampling interval and is expressed as bits per second (kbit/s/Mbit/s/Gbit/s). See data transfer rate.
Another option is “average usage billing”. While most datacenters and hosting providers use the "95th percentile" or “burstable billing”,
others may use average usage billing. This is easier to implement since implementations can function similar to gas or electric utility meter
readings (however, they are usually sampled more often to avoid losing data if systems lose power or reboot).
It could be argued that average use billing is more fair to customers, since the real cost to ISPs is somewhere between average use
and 95th percentile due to oversubscription. Average use ignores the natural peaks and valleys that occur from day to day bandwidth usage.
Here is an example:
Burstable Billing Rate Calculation
Bandwidth is measured (or sampled) from the switch or router and recorded in a log file. In most cases this is done every 5 minutes.
At the end of the month, the samples are sorted from highest to lowest, and the top 5% (which equal to approximately 36 hours of a 30-day
billing cycle) of data is thrown away. The next highest measurement becomes the 'billable utilization' for the month.
Based on this model, the top 36 hours (top 5% of 720 hours) of peak traffic is not taken into account when billed for an entire month.
Bandwidth could be utilized at a higher rate for up to 65 min a day with no financial penalty.
95th percentile in Uncertainty analysis (Statistics) when the concept of 95th percentile is used, it implies that the sets of data will fall in the range of 95% coverage. e.g.) Uncertainty
analysis for Hydrological data.
Criticism for end user billing
- With the 95th percentile billing method there is potential for paying for bandwidth that is not used. However, this method will also allow brief access to peak bandwidth when required. For example, if a website is Slashdotted for an entire weekend (48 hours) then billing would be based on a higher rate just because of that single weekend. Whereas if the peak is shorter (less than 36 hours), the peak would not appear on a usage bill for the month.
- In the 95th percentile billing method inbound and outbound traffic is usually calculated separately. The highest value is then used for billing rather than the sum.
- Customers sometimes mistake the 95th percentile billing method for being able to use up to 95 percent of an assigned port (e.g. 9.5mbit of a 10mbit port, 95mbit of a 100mbit).
- Critics of the 95th percentile billing method usually advocate the use of a flat rate system, billing per byte of data transferred, or using the average throughput rather than the 95th percentile.
- 95th Percentile billing often results in a customer paying double in billing when compared with the Average Rate and what they paid for.
References
- Goldman, Alex. "Cogent's Latest Price Drop", ISP PLANET, April 3, 2006. Accessed April 24, 2008.
- Wikipedia.org - the free encyclopedia
