[londons_explore]

Probably not actually. Transferring one kilobyte across a network link has such a low value that the billing costs of aggregating it cost more than the revenue.

So instead you take a probabilistic approach - charge the user for a megabyte of data transfer 0.1% of the time, and bill nothing 99.9% of the time.

Now the typical cost is the same, the users bill is probably accurate to the cent, but you have divided the number of billing records by 1000.

[michaelmrose]

The way you describe requires somehow counting every bit but somehow discarding most which is obviously nonsense.

This seems statistically invalid insofar as it will tend to overbill potentially by a lot on the minority of cases.

Don't you know how much of the pipe is occupied by a given customers code at any given time or what data is being sent

[londons_explore]

You have to do it when the customer list is too big to keep a counter per customer.

[fc417fc802]

A probabilistic counter per customer is also a counter per customer. Still, probabilistic billing is an amusing thought though.

[michaelmrose]

No you don't

[svobodovic]

I don't know how cloud services count usage, but this is certainly not true for telco. I manage several fleets of hundreds/thousands of SIM cards (mostly IoT/M2M applications), and almost every provider counts the data traffic per byte. Different business and use case, I know, but still.