Sampling traffic in an effort to represent the overall traffic pattern in theory is a sound idea.  In fact, for the most part, I agree that statistically, sampling can be as accurate as rolling a dice 1296 times and expecting exactly 216 matches for each of the 6 possible outcomes.  Well, I doubt it.   When counting massive quantities of data and accuracy matters, we need an alternate solution to sampling but, what is it?

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“Let’s face it, it’s inevitable: Your all-you-can-eat Internet plan is likely going to be history. And if you watch a lot of Netflix and Hulu online, your Internet bill is probably going to go up substantially,” said Dan Frommer, a writer for Business Insider.

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Limiting bandwidth is becoming a trendy thing to do. AT&T already started to limit their bandwidth for broadband and DSL customers earlier this month. AT&T is capping 150 GB to their DSL users and 250 for their U-Verse users with a 10$ fee per 50GB over that. As a service provider looking to move forward in this trend a NetFlow Billing Analyzer is a great way to monitor customer’s bandwidth for billing purposes.

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The first day of Cisco Live Europe 2011 is going well. If you want to check out the new features in our Flexible NetFlow reporting tool, you’ll find us in booth E9, right next to the Cisco store.

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Q: Can you perform billing with sFlowsamples?

A: Yes, depending on how you need to invoice.

Being a vendor that supports NetFlow and sFlow reporting, we deal with lots of flow questions.  Most recently, I was dealing with a customer that was trying to figure out how to do billing with sFlow.  Depending on how you want to invoice, sFlow may or may not be appropriate.  This document from Inmon sums it up nicely by saying, “sampling does not provide a 100% accurate result.”  The document goes on to state, “but it does provide a result in which the error can be accurately characterized.” Which is really a fancy way of saying that sampling allows you to be ‘fairly’ accurate.

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