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Comment by thomseddon | Hacker News Reader

Yeah, because the only cost in broadband delivery is the undersea fibre??

How about the core network? High capacity core routers? Firewalls? Datacentres? Power? Optics? Engineering? Ongoing upkeep? Monitoring? Upstream bandwidth? Interconnects? Peering LAN membership? LIR membership?

In many ways their naivety isn't too surprising, we started an ISP last year (https://telcom.io) and the shear scale of the undertaking and costs baffels us everyday!

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In that case could you comment on a more realistic number? Is a dollar per gig reasonable in any way?

Dollar per gigabit is the current standard way to describe cost of a fiber optic system.

I hate comments like these because for how frustrating someone is saying they know so much more, you don't find any articles written by them, a cost breakdown (because no one wants to share how they do things) and/or no real data. Yes, from the ground up starting an ISP, the trenching, the datacenters & everything in-between cost monies, but relative to a company that has all of this in place and doesn't upgrade anything, it's a moot point. The reason why people complain about caps on anything (cellphone, land data or anything else) is that these companies are making _BILLIONS_ off of us & refuse to upgrade their core network because it's beyond 5 or 10 years old.

Peering? Peering cost almost $0. I've had friends who had gigabit fiber brought in & they peered with people for next to nothing.

Indeed, the naivety of this article is breathtaking. I speak as someone who has worked in telecoms, ISP, DSL and webhoster environments, this person has no idea what he's talking about.

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