said by iansltx :

Upon further inspection, looks like the average internet user, average meaning spread out over all customers, uses about 7 GB per month on the class of connection you guys are talking about (topping out at 1 Mbit usually, it seems). Also, the concept of increasing OS ratios as customer numbers increase is interesting, though I can see how it happens

I wonder what happens when you give customers higher speeds...

said by iansltx :

Hmm, so faster speed tiers just enhances burstiness rather than impacting overall used bandwidth in a hug way (then again landline users seem to use more, so at some point b\w does make a difference).

Thanks to both of you guys for the info, thx to Rhaas for the graphs and "leaderboard". Very helpful.

As to the cost per gigabyte, I agree that unless you're buying in extreme bulk or run your own network you can't come out ahead. Ridiculous what companies are charging now for DS3s etc. Though I'd venture to say that big boys like Comcast (who runs their own nationwide backbone network...FDCServers has a 10GE pipe to them directly) have a bandwidth cost nearer zero than you'd think. With Cachefly's multlink CDN costing 25 cents per gig when you're paying $300 per month, or with Amazon S3's 10-18c per gig with no commitment, I'd suspect the real costs on Comcast etc.'s end are billing overhead, customer equipment and suchlike. Actual bandwidth costs, I'd say, would hover around 6-7 cents per gigabyte assuming full pipe usage. That translates to ~$20 per megabit of dedicated bandwidth, wich would be a reasonable figure to pull out of a hat for such an economy of scale with, what, 14+ million customers? Hecl, I feel it right to complain about their $1.50 per gig overage policy, and that's cost for WiSPs who are at the mercy of telcos for their DS3 loops!

Here's an interesting one though: if providers aren't concerned about uplink capacity (whose usage looks to be at most 30% of downlink) then, on landline guys (note the qualification; yes I know about the whole WiSP connections problem), BitTorrent shouldn't be too much of a problem. The person could download a file once, then seed it out a few times, and that would be that. Just have the ISP tell users "if you must BitTorrent, set your reseed ratio to no more than 2.00 and we're cool with it).

Again, thanks for the information everyone, and thanks in advance should anyone else decide to post some stats.

said by FreebirdFly :

The 1.5 Mbps is simply the speed you allow the customer to download, but if they download 1000 kb every second for hours a day, wouldn't you as and IPS say you are using too much b/w and cap them?