It’s also reasonable for OVH to not do that, as most of their customers don’t understand 95th percentile billing, which is the model that they’re being charged at by their transit suppliers.
It’s also reasonable for OVH to not do that, as most of their customers dont understand that transit costs blend with port costs depending on destination, and some destinations are effectively ‘free’ to send/receive from (fixed port costs only, no marginal costs), and other destinations are not (marginal costs associated with transit supplier fees).
The billing model consumers want is a simple BW used calculation, without facing the reality that if they consume their entire BW allowance as quickly as possible, it incurs order of magnitude higher costs than if they consume it at a trickle over the whole month.
It’s worth going back to the start of this thread and seeing that this all started with someone complaining that their provider had reduced the BW allowance and wanting somewhere with more generous allowances. When the provider sells things for what it actually costs, the customer gets upset and looks for someone selling a subsidised product in a misleading way. Leading to other people getting upset about the mislead. Those people should go to the original provider, who is doing exactly what they asked for!
kind of true except if you've got 1000's of customers it all evens out and your traffic profile is actually quite smooth if you've got say 6 X 100G transits, 4 X 100G IXP ports and 5 X 100G PNIs then the impact of an individual 1G customer is not even noticeable, honestly. We can work to 1Mbps 95%ile being about 250GB of total transfer at scale.
I completely agree. The product being sold has only a loose connection to the cost incurred by the provider. This is why the product being sold is being sold in a vague / loose-ish way, because for the overwhelming majority of customers, the product being sold can be sold for a profit.
It's reasonable for OVH to prevent that, and it's also reasonable for OVH to explicitly and clearly define the limits up front.