nanog mailing list archives

Re: Industry standard bandwidth guarantee?


From: Dorian Kim <dorian () blackrose org>
Date: Thu, 30 Oct 2014 14:21:00 -0400


On Oct 30, 2014, at 8:23 AM, Jimmy Hess <mysidia () gmail com> wrote:

On Wed, Oct 29, 2014 at 7:04 PM, Ben Sjoberg <bensjoberg () gmail com> wrote:

That 3Mb difference is probably just packet overhead + congestion

Yes...  however, that's actually an industry standard of implying
higher performance than reality,  because end users don't care about
the datagram overhead which their applications do not see they just
want X  megabits of  real-world performance, and this industry would
perhaps be better off if we called a link that can deliver at best 17
Megabits of Goodput reliably a  "15 Megabit goodput +5 service"
instead of calling it a "20 Megabit service"

Or at least appended a disclaimer   *"Real-world best case download
performance: approximately  1.8 Megabytes per second"


Subtracting overhead and quoting that instead of raw link speeds.
But that's not the industry standard. I believe the industry standard
is to provide the numerically highest performance number as is
possible through best-case theoretical testing;   let the end user
experience disappointment and explain the misunderstanding later.

End users also more concerned about their individual download rate on
actual file transfers  and not  the total averaged aggregate
throughput of the network of 10 users  or 10 streams downloading data
simultaneously,    or characteristics transport protocols are
concerned about such as fairness.

Not it’s not. All the link speeds are products of standards, be it SDH/SONET,
PDH, or various flavors of ethernet. They are objective numbers. What you are
advocating, given that much of the overhead is per packet/frame overhead
and will vary based on the application and packet size distribution, will create
more confusion than what we have today.

-dorian

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