PN, like any other ISP, buys bandwidth from BT in terms of the capacity per second, not the total transferred over the course of a day. The difference is that the total capacity purchased must be enough for the peak busy-hour, rather than the average over the day... and the unused capacity at other hours is just a costly overhead.

I thought isp's rent a pipe from BT wholesale? By the second sounds very expensive. Would of thought they would pay per Gigabyte or Terabyte.

Edited by deleted (Mon 12-Nov-12 21:06:03)

They pay for throughput Gbits per second, not GBytes transmitted.

The charging point is the MSIL(s) at the WBC node where they rent so many Gbps. The MSIL itself remains BT Wholesale property, rented by the ISP. Normally the MSIL maximum capacity, (in the early days the max was 1Gbps but a 10Gbps one was imminent years ago), is considererably greater than the amount the ISP rents.

So they may rent 6Gpbs, and the actual throughput will vary. I'll link to a graph in a few minutes. (Edit - Link. Looks like multiple MSILs at each unless there are higher than 10Gbps MSILs now. EDit 2 - those graphs show the total of up and down. I think they will be rented separately with 10Gbps the maximum download. Guessing again! ).

If the user demand exceeds the rented amount, the extra is supplied automatically. But at (I think) 5% excess throughput, penal pricing applies. I expect repeated over-use of up to 5% also has some limits but I'm guessing.

I have no idea how the ISP's backhaul from the MSILs to their servers is charged. That can be "BT" or third-party. A different issue.

Edited by RobertoS (Mon 12-Nov-12 21:53:10)

I thought isp's rent a pipe from BT wholesale? By the second sounds very expensive. Would of thought they would pay per Gigabyte or Terabyte.

As per my twice edited previous post, nope. That's what gives rise to all sorts of complications, as basically nearly all ISPs charge the user by the number of GBs received, and sometimes sent.

Working out what to charge for a user plan, and how much throughput to rent, is not simple.

Entanet WBC throughput meters.

Thanks and for the other posts. Think plusnet and BT should do something like that.

That can also indicate how busy them areas are.

There's a link in my third post back to a similar PN meter - shows the last 24 hour history at 30-minute intervals, updated every 30 minutes.

If you look at the "path" above the PN graphs and go back a step, there's one for the latency as well.

My gateway at present is ptw-ag03...which though? Faraday? Colindale? Which Faraday or Colindale for that matter?

In that sense the graphs are kind of useless unless there's a massive rise in latency across the network. I suppose if your gateway was high latency, then you could spot it, but with QoS, and load balancing, I doubt it would be a big issue. A reboot or two would change the gateway.

Regarding that Entanet 21CN Interconnect Status link; is that just Entanet's network or is that some measure of current UK latency?

Just Entanet's MSILs. Note that just like PN, there are separate ones for WBC and IPSC.

In reply to a post by camieabz:

My gateway at present is ptw-ag03...which though? Faraday? Colindale?

That thought occurred to me as well. I assume that the two link up before hitting the gateways, so I agree with you.

Which Faraday or Colindale for that matter?

How do you mean? I don't understand the question .

In reply to a post by RobertoS:

How do you mean? I don't understand the question .

No matter. It was the latency graphs (spikes), and there are two instances of each gateway in the key, but they're the same colour.