Re: modeling residential subscriber bandwidth demand

[Louie Lee via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

+1 Also on this.

> From my viewpoint, the game is roughly the same for the last 20+ years. You
might want to validate that your per-customer bandwidth use across your
markets is roughly the same for the same service/speeds/product. If you
have that data over time, then you can extrapolate what each market's
bandwidth use would be when you lay on a customer growth forecast.

But for something that's simpler and actionable now, yeah, just make sure
that your upstream and peering(!!) links are not congested. I agree that
the 50-75% is a good target not only for the lead time to bring up more
capacity, but also to allow for spikes in traffic for various events
throughout the year.

Louie
Google Fiber


On Tue, Apr 2, 2019 at 11:36 AM jim deleskie <deleskie () gmail com> wrote:

> +1 on this. its been more than 10 years since I've been responsible for a
> broadband network but have friends that still play in that world and do
> some very good work on making sure their models are very well managed, with
> more math than I ever bothered with, That being said, If had used the
> methods I'd had used back in the 90's they would have fully predicted per
> sub growth including all the FB/YoutubeNetflix traffic we have today. The
> "rapid" growth we say in the 90's and the 2000' and even this decade are
> all magically the same curve, we'd just further up the incline, the
> question is will it continue another 10+ years, where the growth rate is
> nearing straight up :)
>
> -jim
>
> On Tue, Apr 2, 2019 at 3:26 PM Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike () swm pp se>
> wrote:
>
> > On Tue, 2 Apr 2019, Tom Ammon wrote:
> >
> > > Netflow for historical data is great, but I guess what I am really
> > > asking is - how do you anticipate the load that your eyeballs are going
> > > to bring to your network, especially in the face of transport tweaks
> > > such as QUIC and TCP BBR?
> >
> > I don't see how QUIC and BBR is going to change how much bandwidth is
> > flowing.
> >
> > If you want to make your eyeballs happy then make sure you're not
> > congesting your upstream links. Aim for max 50-75% utilization in 5
> > minute
> > average at peak hour (graph by polling interface counters every 5
> > minutes). Depending on your growth curve you might need to initiate
> > upgrades to make sure they're complete before utilization hits 75%.
> >
> > If you have thousands of users then typically just look at the statistics
> > per user and extrapolate. I don't believe this has fundamentally changed
> > in the past 20 years, this is still best common practice.
> >
> > If you go into the game of running your links full parts of the day then
> > you're into the game of trying to figure out QoE values which might mean
> > you spend more time doing that than the upgrade would cost.
> >
> > --
> > Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike () swm pp se