> At the end of the month, the top 5% of usage information was discarded, to eliminate spikes, which were assumed to be measurement errors.
Not actually true. The bandwidth measurements don't have accuracy problems; providers use 95th percentile billing to make connections "burstable", allowing servers to handle an small unexpected traffic spike without a huge bill. And on the flip side, many sites have a traffic pattern of highs during a subset of the day (customers' waking hours or business hours or non-business hours, depending on the site) and lows outside that period (sleeping, etc), for which 95th percentile billing produces a higher bill than just charging for bytes transferred.
Very few customers have the kind of traffic pattern that would allow for using bandwidth during only 5% of the month. And in this particular case, Google could just as easily have saturated a 50Mbps line rather than using 5% of a gigabit line, which would have massively reduced (though not completely eliminated) the bill.
> At the end of the month, the top 5% of usage information was discarded, to eliminate spikes, which were assumed to be measurement errors.
Not actually true. The bandwidth measurements don't have accuracy problems; providers use 95th percentile billing to make connections "burstable", allowing servers to handle an small unexpected traffic spike without a huge bill. And on the flip side, many sites have a traffic pattern of highs during a subset of the day (customers' waking hours or business hours or non-business hours, depending on the site) and lows outside that period (sleeping, etc), for which 95th percentile billing produces a higher bill than just charging for bytes transferred.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Burstable_billing
Very few customers have the kind of traffic pattern that would allow for using bandwidth during only 5% of the month. And in this particular case, Google could just as easily have saturated a 50Mbps line rather than using 5% of a gigabit line, which would have massively reduced (though not completely eliminated) the bill.