TY - GEN
T1 - The utility argument – making a case for broadband SLAs
AU - Bischof, Zachary S.
AU - Bustamante, Fabian E
AU - Stanojevic, Rade
N1 - Funding Information:
We thank our shepherd Monia Ghobadi and the anonymous reviewers for their invaluable feedback. This work was supported in part by the National Science Foundation through Award CNS 1218287.
Publisher Copyright:
© Springer International Publishing AG 2017.
PY - 2017
Y1 - 2017
N2 - Most residential broadband services are described in terms of their maximum potential throughput rate, often advertised as having speeds “up to X Mbps”. Though such promises are often met, they are fairly limited in scope and, unfortunately, there is no basis for an appeal if a customer were to receive compromised quality of service. While this ‘best effort’ model was sufficient in the early days, we argue that as broadband customers and their devices become more dependent on Internet connectivity, we will see an increased demand for more encompassing Service Level Agreements (SLA). In this paper, we study the design space of broadband SLAs and explore some of the trade-offs between the level of strictness of SLAs and the cost of delivering them. We argue that certain SLAs could be offered almost immediately with minimal impact on retail prices, and that ISPs (or third parties) could accurately infer the risk of offering SLA to individual customers – with accuracy comparable to that in the car or credit insurance industry – and price the SLA service accordingly.
AB - Most residential broadband services are described in terms of their maximum potential throughput rate, often advertised as having speeds “up to X Mbps”. Though such promises are often met, they are fairly limited in scope and, unfortunately, there is no basis for an appeal if a customer were to receive compromised quality of service. While this ‘best effort’ model was sufficient in the early days, we argue that as broadband customers and their devices become more dependent on Internet connectivity, we will see an increased demand for more encompassing Service Level Agreements (SLA). In this paper, we study the design space of broadband SLAs and explore some of the trade-offs between the level of strictness of SLAs and the cost of delivering them. We argue that certain SLAs could be offered almost immediately with minimal impact on retail prices, and that ISPs (or third parties) could accurately infer the risk of offering SLA to individual customers – with accuracy comparable to that in the car or credit insurance industry – and price the SLA service accordingly.
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U2 - 10.1007/978-3-319-54328-4_12
DO - 10.1007/978-3-319-54328-4_12
M3 - Conference contribution
AN - SCOPUS:85015972497
SN - 9783319543277
T3 - Lecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
SP - 156
EP - 169
BT - Passive and Active Measurement - 18th International Conference, PAM 2017, Proceedings
A2 - Uhlig, Steve
A2 - Amann, Johanna
A2 - Kaafar, Mohamed Ali
PB - Springer Verlag
T2 - 18th International Conference on Passive and Active Measurement, PAM 2017
Y2 - 30 March 2017 through 31 March 2017
ER -