What alicia said is correct AFAIK… I believe below a certain bandwidth setting your server is NOT included in the global / default pool… Only the local zones. Of course it doesn’t guarantee the person making the requests are in that geolocation, merely that’s what the client is configured for. The actual bandwidth setting I think is mentioned somewhere on the pool pages, but I didn’t see it quickly glancing on the “joining” or “manage” pages.
I believe Ask was going to make some code changes (eventually) so that the pool DNS would geo-target any requests instead of the need for people to manually configure their clients for whatever zone. This would help out a lot for pre-configured clients or hard-coded devices that might have been set with like the US or Europe, but end up elsewhere in the world. There was a lengthy discussion about some Android devices exclusively hitting the US pool when they were located all over the globe due to a hard-coded config.
As-is, the bandwidth settings are pretty well balanced. I started my server out low and slowly bumped it up monitoring the QPS. Once you figure out the baseline number, calculating out how much traffic you would get at a certain speed setting is quite trivial.
Also remember that NTP packets are only 48 bytes. So even at 1,000 QPS (which is about what my server is getting at 250Mb pool setting, US location), that’s only ~0.384 Mb/s of bandwidth up & down… When I had it at the 50Mb setting it was around 200 QPS, or about 77Kb/s bandwidth…
It’s hard to really say how many QPS you would get at the real low rates (i.e. 1Mb or below). In theory it would be single-digit queries per second, if all the clients were well behaved. Except I’ve found a very very small percentage (~0.4% to be precise) of misbehaving clients that like to continually query 1/s (or faster)…
Yes, I get traffic from all over the world, I posted a chart in another thread (link below). About 78% of my traffic was US, next highest was CN at almost 8%, and RU at almost 3%…