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Comment by mythz | Hacker News Reader

Pure B.S. Cloud providers over charge for bandwidth because they can, they treat it like a luxury cost like RAM where if you need more bandwidth you can usually afford to pay for it. It's not the "right" cost, it's the price AWS set which Azure copied.

Bandwidth is dirt cheap outside of the Cloud, e.g. I'm getting 30 TB of bandwidth as part of my 64GB RAM / 500GB SSD / Quad-Core i7 Skylake for €39 /mo (https://www.hetzner.de/us/hosting/produkte_rootserver/ex41ss...). Which roughly equates to €0.0009 /GB that also includes the cost of hosting entire server with resources that would cost an order of magnitude more on AWS/Azure.

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> Bandwidth is dirt cheap outside of the Cloud

Enterprise level network equipment and infrastructure are extremely expensive. Unusually cheap BW rate usually means cheap equipment or over-subscription or not enough qualified support personnel. And in some cases under-selling to get penetration to a market.

The reason Google Fiber can sell cheaply because (AFAIK), in almost every town or cities that they deployed their network they negotiated special deals with municipalities or equivalent entity to get free access to existing infrastructure or get special deals. There is a reason why Google Fibre is not everywhere or they are not pushing it very aggressively. Because building networks are freaking expensive even for google.

BW may not have any value but building the network and maintaining it to serve you BW is expensive. Your BW cost is a reflection of the cost of your network.

Disclaimer: I own an ISP.

> There is a reason why Google Fibre is not everywhere or they are not pushing it very aggressively. Because building networks are freaking expensive even for google.

I am not sure if that is entirely true. At least, Google owns the fibers between any 2 google data centers. It is probably only the last-mile that needs municipality support.

I was specifically referring to last mile fibers in reply to OP implying that outside the cloud business internet is cheap. In this context, I was not talking about cloud business and connectivity cost within data centers (which are also not cheap btw).

> I'm getting 30 TB of bandwidth as part of my 64GB RAM / 500GB SSD / Quad-Core i7 Skylake for €39 /mo

Yes, you're getting cheap pricing from an oversubscribed line.

Or not, just ran a speed test: getting 160% more bandwidth on Hetzner than my EC2 instance.

Oversubscribed means there's a chance you won't receive the rated speed. Just because tonight's results were good, doesn't guarantee you'll always achieve that.

One data point is clearly indicative enough to be conclusive.

or +1 data point more than all other baseless responses, but apparently still not enough effort to refute BS lawn-chair factoids.

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