Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

Comment by JoshTriplett | Hacker News Reader

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>> Of course; they buy it from ISPs, and now you have the same problem again.

> What problem?

The message I originally replied to said "End customers don't buy the dumb pipe directly." And once an ISP starts trying to provide value above and beyond the pipe, all the same questions about neutrality come up again.

> If you got serious content demand, do a private interconnect and get the content for the price of a crossconnect.

> The content providers will send you a CDN node to you, for free.

What happened to "dumb pipe"? Both of these, especially the former, seem to contradict that.

> You obviously never bought wholesale bandwidth. Wholesale IP transit is 20 cents or less per Mbps. IX peering is cheaper than that. Private interconnects, again cheaper.

I have, in fact, looked into both wholesale bandwidth and IX peering (though not in the last year or two). Both of which, at least in the areas and exchanges I've looked in, were several times higher than the cost you're quoting. It's entirely possible that you have access to better information/markets, or that ISPs can get much lower pricing; I based the comment I made on the information I had.

All the numbers I've seen suggested that raw bandwidth costs significantly more than ISPs charge for it, because consumer ISPs rarely expect 24/7 utilization of the full bandwidth, and likely also because they can provide some of the larger sources of content for free out of their own datacenter.

> The message I originally replied to said "End customers don't buy the dumb pipe directly."

But they do, and that's what they want to keep on doing. An Internet connection is by definition a dumb pipe. It's only when you start messing with it and prioritizing traffic that it becomes something else.

> And once an ISP starts trying to provide value above and beyond the pipe, all the same questions about neutrality come up again.

No, this is just a silly argument. Just because an ISP provider other services in addition to or on top of the Internet connection does not make nor any net neutrality issues. It is only when they start prioritizing stuff that there is an issue.

> What happened to "dumb pipe"? Both of these, especially the former, seem to contradict that.

Nothing. Seriously, this is how the Internet works and is supposed to work. You are supposed to interconnect networks, that's why it's called the Internet. Doh!

Just because somebody else has a shorter path to you than somebody else doesn't make it wrong or unfair.

> All the numbers I've seen suggested that raw bandwidth costs significantly more than ISPs charge for it, because consumer ISPs rarely expect 24/7 utilization of the full bandwidth, and likely also because they can provide some of the larger sources of content for free out of their own datacenter.

Well, it doesn't and it's not for the reasons you state. Wholesale bandwidth prices decrease by 30% on average year on year. Consumer prices are stagnant, or rising.

While it's true that consumers don't use their connection 24/7 (although some make a pretty good go at it), the ISPs could without much problem support that use case. Furthermore ISPs provide close to zero of the content consumers consume. All the content is coming from the content providers, either directly, via an IX or a local cache. The ISPs have nothing to do with it, they are just dumb pipes.

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