Friday, April 3, 2009

Over-Booking vs. Over-Provisioning

We might already be heard these terms, in particular if we are inside or at least talk about network-related-things in an ISP / NSP. Overbooking is "a term used to describe the sale of access to a service which exceeds the capacity of the service" (Wikipedia). Over-provisioning is exactly the opposite i.e. a term used to describe how much excess/free capacity are available compared to used-capacity. In the networking world, overbooked system, sometimes, is also called over-subscribed system.

Users/customers of a provider will not have anything against Over-Provisioning, right? :-D ... But the provider does! Why ? You know this already I think, it's more-or-less about trade-off between Quality for customers' side vs. cost for providers' side.



A good provider deploys not only over-booking but also over-provisioning! Confused? How could two opposite schemes can be deployed simultaneously ?? ... :-D ... Right, something like "space division multiplex"! A provider (not necessarily a good one) usually appllies over-booking at access level (including international or domestic/peering connections). A good provider usually applies over-provisioning in their core networks!

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