contents 1. How It Works 2. Advantages 3. Choices Accompanying Unmetered Services Billing 4. Apples and Oranges: “Unlimited and “Unmetered” 5. What Happens “IF” 6.

Once you have decided that you will hire the services of a dedicated hosting provider you will have several options to choose from. One of the most important ones is how much bandwidth you are going to purchase. For those that are learning about these new trends and vocabulary terms, bandwidth is “the capacity of data transfer” (wikipedia.org). When purchasing bandwidth you will have to decide under which program you wish to be billed. One, out of three, options is the Unmetered Services manner.

Using telecom standards, bandwidth capacity is billed in three manners: 1) 95th, 2) Unmetered Services and, 3) total transfer. The second option, Unmetered Services, refers to billing the client with only the capacity of bandwidth he/she has purchased. For example, if you purchase 3 megabytes, your service provider will “cap”, or monitor your particular account to ensure that you do not exceed those 3 megabytes of bandwidth you are paying for and, therefore, do not incur in “overcharges”.

The main advantage of Unmetered Services is that the client is protected against being charged with using more bandwidth than agreed upon in the contract. Now, with the vast amount of information being transferred and used, providers are charging Unmetered Services users based on the gigabyte (GB) measurement versus the megabyte (MB), which allows for more bandwidth. The advantages of possessing greater bandwidth are faster downloads of your website and more usage of the system by the company’s employees thus allowing for higher work performanc. There are companies that are currently leasing up to 1 tetrabyte (TB) of Unmetered Services due to the high volume of traffic they generate.

Now that you know just how much bandwidth you need or want, your next decision will be based on whether you want your server to be dedicated or shared, which means just that – either you will have your own server or will share one with another of the Unmetered Services provider’s clients.

Another choice you will have is whether you want your Unmetered Service as “limited” or “unlimited”. With a limited Unmetered Service contract what you are basically paying for is the unmetered portion of the broadband width alongside a limited amount of technical support.

In this particular case, what you must ensure is that “your applications and/or protocols don’t fail due to interference of your Internet Service Provider’s (ISP) protocols.” (electronicfrontierfoundation.com). A way to prevent this is to “find protocols, or alternative use-cases for their existing protocols, that are not blocked by…” (electronicfrontierfoundation.com) your particular Internet Service Provider.

It makes sense for people to confuse these two terms and believe that they mean the same thing. They do NOT. When opting for “unlimited” service you are referring to the capacity of broadband. When going the Unmetered Service route, you are designating that you wish to be billed for whatever broadband capacity you use, only. Obviously, these two terms are “apples and oranges”. While one has to do with access (unlimited), the other has to do with usage (Unmetered Services). Ensure that you check your Broadband Contract carefully to make sure that you are getting what you paid for.

A normal question: “What happens if I exceed the amount of bandwidth I have agreed to pay in my Unmetered Services contract”? Though it should not happen, for your consumption if being monitored, if for some reason you exceed the amount of bandwidth you have agreed to pay for, “your traffic will be shaped until it falls back into your allotted bandwidth”, (webhostingtalk.com).

Traffic is categorized in three levels – 1) sensitive, 2) best effort and, 3) undesired. The “shaping of traffic”, also known as “packet shaping” or, “ITMP’s” (Internet Traffic Management Practices) is “the control of computer network traffic in order to optimize or guarantee performance, lower latency, and/or increase usable bandwidth by delaying packets that meet certain criteria.” (IETF RFC 2475 "An Architecture for Differentiated Services" section 2.3.3.3 - definition of "Shaper”). Unmetered services, therefore, takes your undesired traffic and, in layman’s terms, puts it at the back of the line to wait until the bandwidth returns to its normal range. Companies which have offices in separate geographical locations are preferring to shape their traffic instead of increasing their wide area network, thus saving money.

Due to the fact that this is a relatively new industry there is not much regulation or industry standards to use as guidelines. Therefore, different companies will employ their own interpretation. Make sure that when signing any contract, you read such carefully – especially, the fine print.