I have come across 3 colo providers at the moment. Two uses average base on mrtg graph billing method. One provide Committed access rate line.

Let say the cost of 10 mbps committed access line cost the same as 6Mpbs mrtg graph billing(100Mbps port). Which would you choose??

How much traffic would you be able to push out with 10 Mbps commited access line without noticing slow connection.

PS: I am talking about 3-4 servers combine traffic here.

I would choose the 6 Mbps burstable. I got one really good offer for capped bandwith, but I had to decline the offer because I like to have some room for unpredicted traffic any time.

cheers,
:beer:

is the 6mbps being billed as actual (aka they just giving you 1800gb), or is it 95%? that makes a big difference :)

If you get a flat rate for 10Mbps I would go for that over the 6Mpbs burstable. This way you'll know what your bill is every month.

10Mbps is alot for three sites combined.

Remember that the MRTG graphing is produced over a 5 minute average. The way that CAR works is your subinterface has a command like this:

interface FastEthernet0/0.3
description your interface
encapsulation dot1q 3
ip address 10.0.0.1 255.255.255.0
rate-limit input 10000000 32000 32000 conform-action transmit exceed- action drop
rate-limit output 10000000 32000 32000 conform-action transmit exceed-action drop

If you do a sh int fa0/0.3 rate-limit you will see in pretty much real time how much traffic is exceeding the threshold, thus being dropped in Kbps. Depending upon the type of traffic you are pushing across the interface, especially if it is bursty, you may be in excess of the bit buckets and traffic will be dropped. Even though your 5 minute average might be 9Mbps, for 2.5 minutes you could be pushing 11Mbps and for 2.5 minutes you could be pushing 7Mbps (2Mbps of traffic would be dropped in this example). A good rule of thumb is to subscribe to utilize no more than 80% of your CAR on a 5 minute average. This gives you some room to avoid latency issues derived from traffic being dropped.

On an open circuit, you don't have this ceiling. It all depends on how much oversubscription is happening in either case. PM me if you'd like to speak more about CAR.

Regards,

Larry Patterson