openbox9
join:2004-01-26
Alexandria, VA
kudos:2 | said by as_usual :
Whats the real cost of "Bandwidth"? I would say that the "real" cost of bandwidth is whatever your upstream provider is charging you for a connection. Good data centers have a large amount of bandwidth available from various providers. They procure bandwidth to a single point and may be part of a telco hotel with other providers to leverage existing/shared infrastructure to reduce costs. The data center's network is typically internal to a building or campus of buildings so there is no cost to extend infrastructure across hundreds/thousands of miles. Try routinely transferring 2 TB (I seriously doubt your shared host is even capable of transmitting that much data) per month and see how long your remain a Godaddy customer at $14.99/mth.said by as_usual :
charging for "over using" bandwidth is just another hidden fee passed on to the general consumer. Not very hidden if you're told you have a cap up front. |
dobbs
join:2006-12-16
Wenatchee, WA
1 edit | As I understand your post, telco hotels distribute cabling costs between many (hosting, service, what-have-you) businesses. These companies then distribute their operating costs (space rental, power, bandwidth...) to their customers marketed as rack-space or CPU time+storage rental, uptime and bandwidth.
To apply this model to the topic at hand, the "inherent" cost of residential internet service can then be blamed on cabling maintenance and upstream bandwidth?
The following is my mind rambling along this concept. The healthiest option is probably to ignore it.
In Washington, the Chelan County PUD has deployed a residential fiber network (»fiber.chelanpud.org/ ). Not having familiarised myself with this Utopia network I can only assume it's similar, but it should work fine for this discussion. To spell it out, the PUD offers commercial ISPs an option to rent virtual connections between peoples' homes and the ISP's office, which are all (ISP office, residences) on the PUD's network. The PUD charges the ISP a flat fee per virtual circuit. These virtual circuits are uncapped and purchased by bandwidth alotment, meaning you get 5, 10 or 100Mbps or whatever that doesn't run out. Beyond that flat fee per customer, the ISP has to pay for its (upstream) internet connection. The ISP where I worked bought internet bandwidth in discrete chunks. So if we were serving 1000 customers each with 5Mbps links and they all constantly drew 5Mbps, we would need to purchase 5000Mbps*24h*3600s*30.5d = ~13Pbits every month. ISPs operate on the assumption that this isn't the case, so they don't have to buy the theoretical maximum amount of internet bandwidth their customers could use and pass the savings onto the customer. It's a happy little world.
Unfortunately, customers demand their bills be predictable when they themselves are not.
Enter bandwidth caps. In the round-about explanation above, an ISP makes more money on customers that don't use bandwidth and less on those that do. Caps provide a legal framework to remove customers that don't earn them as much profit. Actually, they could legally deny service to anyone, so maybe it's a form of communicating the rules to the customer. This of course doesn't answer the question posed, which is how much profit an ISP makes on the piddly amount of bandwidth you use at home; that's an economics question.
Hmm, and going with the idea of local proxies to reduce backbone transfers, I wonder if/how much an ISP could save by running P2P software that only uploads to their customers, assuming nobody sued them for piracy. The answer is probably along the lines of, "Not as much as blocking it altogether." Which is more ethical, I wonder. |
openbox9
join:2004-01-26
Alexandria, VA
kudos:2 | said by dobbs:To apply this model to the topic at hand, the "inherent" cost of residential internet service can then be blamed on cabling maintenance and upstream bandwidth? And customer service, management costs, taxes, franchise fees, etc.said by dobbs:This of course doesn't answer the question posed, which is how much profit an ISP makes on the piddly amount of bandwidth you use at home; that's an economics question. Yep, and the only one who will really know the "cost of bandwidth" is the one signing the lease from the upstream provider.said by dobbs:I wonder if/how much an ISP could save by running P2P software that only uploads to their customers, assuming nobody sued them for piracy. The answer is probably along the lines of, "Not as much as blocking it altogether." Ask Bram Cohen. Obviously, blocking P2P will cost the ISP less in the long run.said by dobbs:Which is more ethical, I wonder. Depends on whether you dictate to your customers what the rules are before they become your customers. |
dobbs
join:2006-12-16
Wenatchee, WA | said by openbox9:Depends on whether you dictate to your customers what the rules are before they become your customers. Good point. However, two problems stand out. Blocking is a cloak-and-dagger arms race. P2P can and will hide behind other 'mainstream' traffic. Some authorized traffic will suffer. Secondly and far less technical (esoteric?), how many people actually read their EULAs and AUPs? Companies expend tremendous effort in covering their own asses such that contracts aren't written in language understood by the population at large. Yes, yes, it's the customer's responsibility to read and understand the contracts to which they agree. What incentives does a business have to make their contracts easily understandable?
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