One number, three denominators, and the rules that decide when it is ready to publish.
Spend alone produces a question. Spend joined to delivered bandwidth, with the circuit's role and its contract in evidence, produces an invoice credit or a defensible disconnect. That join is the whole point of Riopex, and cost per megabit delivered is the shape it takes.
The arithmetic is deliberately boring. What makes it usable is everything printed around it, and the first of those is the denominator it chose.
The headline denominator is delivered bandwidth: a percentile of the hourly buckets, bidirectional, with the bucket width stored on the row. It is named for its bucket, because an unqualified percentile is the first thing a carrier disputes, and it is a different measure from a carrier's five-minute burstable figure.
The fallback is contracted capacity, which needs no monitoring integration and is therefore available in week one. It appears wherever a binding is still pending or coverage is too low to carry the delivered figure, and the row says which of the two you are reading.
The third is a coverage-weighted mean, used as a diagnostic input to findings. It stays out of published comparisons, because an average hides the peak that decides whether a circuit is correctly sized.
Some services wait for a denominator that never arrives: a mobile plan, a number range, a hosting line. They are counted in the service total and marked as not comparable, which keeps the chart honest and the total complete.
Units are the other reason a number waits. Capacity is stored in kilobits and converted to megabits in exactly one place, with a test that fails if it ever moves. Some monitoring platforms store bytes per second while displaying kilobits, which is a factor of eight sitting inside the denominator. Both conversions live in one tested module, because a second implementation is a second answer.
Once the number is ready, it goes to work in two conversations.
Inside the group, it is the fair way to compare operating companies, because it prices the thing being delivered rather than the thing being invoiced. Two entities on two continents finally hold the same unit.
With a carrier, it is the evidence behind a specific ask on a specific circuit, dated, with its coverage and its contract attached. It stays inside the group rather than being ranked against other customers, because pricing-confidentiality clauses make anything wider a consent question.
Both conversations rest on a numerator that a controller would recognise.
Recurring charges and discounts, netted, normalised to one month, and converted to the group's presentation currency at the policy rate for that month. Usage charges, one-off installation fees and taxes stay out, because a run rate that moves with last month's roaming bill is no longer a run rate.
Charges that could not be classified are kept, marked, and routed to review. Keeping an unrecognised line visible is what stops a telecom expense product quietly under-reporting spend.
Every figure the numerator feeds carries the same label set, and coverage is the one that travels furthest.
Coverage is the fraction of a period that actually had data. Every published figure carries it, along with the number of services behind it, the currency basis and the version of the metric definition that produced it.
The rules are strict because the alternative is a plausible lie. Zero coverage means missing, never zero bits per second. A twenty-minute hour is a one-third-coverage hour. Every sample is used as observed, and a discarded sample decrements coverage. Below a display threshold the delivered figure waits, and below a higher threshold it stays out of a waste finding.
The place all of this lands is the group view, where the same delivered megabit is priced in two countries at once.
