Tim Starling wrote:
My idea for faster, cheaper access to Wikipedia in poorer countries:
http://meta.wikimedia.org/wiki/Reducing_transit_requirements
It requires patching squid and extending the HTCP protocol. The latter should be no big deal, the protocol is only in the "experimental" phase after all.
-- Tim Starling
Interesting. I don't know of anyone charging different rates for day/night IP traffic (let me know if anyone on the list knows better). However, this _is_ the indirect effect of existing pricing policies.
Most first-world wholesale IP bandwidth is (AFAIK) charged at 95-percentile rates: that is, for the lowest bandwidth below which your short-timescale traffic bandwidth falls 95% of the time. In general, the provider gives you a bigger physical pipe than you currently need, for the same reason that that credit card companies give you ever-increasing credit limits -- in the hope that your usage will grow progressively to fill it.
If you add a small increment to your traffic at your daily peak, you will push up your 95% figure. If you add it at your off-peak time, it won't. Thus, for anyone on a 95% deal, small increments in off-peak traffic are effectively "free".
-- Neil