said by tanzam75:The problem is that you can never tell when a bandwidth hog will move in and wreck the calculations. Well, unless you put in caps, to keep the bandwidth hogs out.
And you're opposed to caps.
Caps don't do sh*t. It's just another way for them to make even more money without fixing the problem. Upgrading your infrastructure and backbone investment does.
..and the whole "bandwidth hog" thing is crap anyway. So, you have an OC3 connection feeding hundreds of customers that have purchased a 5mbps connection. Then a "bandwidth hog" comes in and uses a bit of it. Hey, he's paying for the 5mbps connection that you advertised. Then everyone's connection slows down because you failed to account for people actually using their connection speeds.
It's simple math. 5Mbps * 100 customers = 500Mbps. There is no way a single OC3 can handle that. You also have to account for growth if you get more customers. So if you get 150-200 customers, YOU NEED at least a GbE connection to handle that traffic, not the same OC3.
The point is, don't advertise the speeds you can't deliver. Sure, you can advertise "up to 1000Mbps", but if you can't deliver anywhere close to those speeds, your customers are going to hate you and there's the possibility of a lawsuit (false advertising).
Also, don't expect to minimally invest in your infrastructure and expect massive returns. I've seen plenty of ISP's and companies fail because of that.