Re: Update wanted on Big Pond Cable Modem service

George Michaelson (ggm@connect.com.au)
Tue, 14 Oct 1997 10:24:26 +1000

Most of us have some concept of elapsed time and the charging used by other
ISPs, but I certainly have no idea of how many megabytes I send and receive

Depending on your platform you can see this information at a range of levels.
On W95 for instance, the control-bar icon for networks will (under show detail)
provide inbound and outbound bytecount on the interface which is a rough guide
to network usage (modulo PPP overheads)

As a rule of thumb, website owners use 10% of served bytes as the inbound
protocol load of sending that data. I think you can assume thats symmetric
for clients so if you request 1Mbyte of data, you probably send somewhere
under 100k to get it. Thus you might expect to be billed 1.1Mbytes. (if the
bill is the addative sum of inbound and outbound)

Beware however that many billing methods count DECIMAL mega and giga so there
are more billable megabytes than show up on-disk where powers-of-two are used.

-George

--
George Michaelson         |  connect.com.au pty/ltd
Email: ggm@connect.com.au |  c/o AAPT,
Phone: +61 7 3834 9976    |  level 8, the Riverside Centre,
  Fax: +61 7 3834 9908    |  123 Eagle St, Brisbane QLD 4000