Hacker News Reader

Comment by trafficlight | Hacker News Reader

I was thinking utilities in terms of electricity, gas, water or sewer.

My point was that internet is not the same as those. Generating the packets costs nothing and moving them down the wire costs nothing. Whether your router is passing packets at top capacity or it's staying almost idle, it's consuming the same amount of electricity and the same amount of upkeep. Your wires don't get damaged by the packets.

In the case of electricity (etc.) there's an actual amount of work that goes into each KWh and that's what you pay for. With internet, there's just the upfront cost of connecting a router and paying a sysadmin team to support it; after that, operating it is a flat cost no matter how many packets pass through it.

Unless I'm a Tier 1 service provider, I have to pay for those bits moving out of my network.

Can you give me some citation on that? I can believe it would be the case, but such an arrangement sounds moronically greedy.

Unless you count expansion and upgrades. Bandwidth increases up to 1G are relatively cheap then things become crazy expensive fast. And of course this is assuming you can get unmetered bandwidth as an ISP (only available for dark fibre bundle owners - incumbent telcos exclusively).

You have to dig fibers at some point - at a cost of ~$15-100 per meter.

Feel free to join my "unmetered" internet. I've connected my routers via 56k lines to eachother, but we never even throttle a single customer. Of course given the chances of even a single packet ever reaching it's destination are so low you probably shouldn't even bother connecting to the network at all ...

Reply on news.ycombinator.com