[LINK] Australia Gets Broadband =?ISO-8859-1?B?liA=?=A S low Connection For A High Price

[Stilgherrian]

On 15/7/07 8:03 PM, "Jan Whitaker" <jwhit at melbpc.org.au> wrote:
> I knew what Richard meant -- at least I think I did. 'best effort' =
> maximum on the best of days, the most throughput you could ever
> expect. And the amount you actually do get is affected by the factors
> you listed, Steve. [snip]

There's also a more specific usage of "best effort" in relation to providing
network services, which is about the reliability level of the service.

A service level of "99.9% uptime" means that if the uptime is measured on a
monthly basis the service can be down for about 45 minutes per month in
total. This is why an ISP advertising "guaranteed 99.5% uptime" isn't
anything to write home about, 'cos it means downtime of three and a half
hours a month.

A service level described as "best efforts" means that there is no
guaranteed minimum uptime level. It means "no guarantee at all", really.

Currently the vast majority of ISPs and Internet hosting providers offer
"best effort" service. And in a sense there's nothing wrong with that, for
two reasons:

  * Most of the entire world runs on "best effort" reliability.

  * If you consider the entire system from the user's computer to
    the ISP to the Internet backbone to, say, YouTube, then the
    weakest link is NOT the ISP but the user's computer.

    (Well, actually it's the user, 'cos they probably sleep or at
    least a few hours a day.)

HTH,

Stil


-- 
Stilgherrian http://stilgherrian.com/
Internet, IT and Media Consulting, Sydney, Australia
mobile +61 407 623 600
fax +61 2 9516 5630
ABN 25 231 641 421