If you're in the top 1% of non-stop bandwidth users, shouldn't you pay more?
Why is it OK for AWS & Google Cloud to meter by the GB, but not Comcast?
Why is it OK for AWS & Google Cloud to meter by the GB, but not Comcast?
In addition, with AWS I can always switch to a cheaper provider. I can not switch to a cheaper cable company.
And that only kicks in after the first 300GB.
AWS/Google retail bandwidth prices are a bad comparison, as they are ridiculously expensive compared to wholesale bandwidth prices.
Wholesale bandwidth costs about 0.1 cents per GB. Not quite 1000X what Comcast charges, it's "only" 100X the wholesale rate.
To give you some perspective, Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net said they spend about 3% of their costs on bandwidth. Please consider that Sonic is a small actor and at scale costs will be less.
Not to mention that bringing bandwidth to a DC is way cheaper than bringing it to individual homes.
We are not talking about individuals buying retail bandwidth here.
It doesn't make sense to compare retail prices to wholesale prices. If an average coder can't even get bandwidth at $0.001/GB with some serious effort, then how this this a valid point of comparison for how much bandwidth should cost for the average internet user?
I doubt you can get Level3 or Internap to beat HE prices.
It very much does. It gives you a sense of real world marginal costs, a fair assessment of fair market value (fair retail cost = reasonable markup factor * wholesale cost) and a sense of scale.
> If an average coder can't even get bandwidth at $0.001/GB with some serious effort,
If I can, you can. I've even given examples with links to order pages. Not that I recommend FDCservers, mind you.
> then how this this a valid point of comparison for how much bandwidth should cost for the average internet user?
It's a valid point because it tells you how much bandwidth ACTUALLY costs compared to what Comcast says it costs.
> I doubt you can get Level3 or Internap to beat HE prices.
How much money do you have on you? There's a bet I'd like to win.
Commit to a single DC is not the same thing as metered bandwidth to thousands of customers.
- Running fiber to a DC is way easier than running it house that could be in the middle of nowhere.
- Commit != selling bandwidth by the byte. I think you fail to understand this. I don't have the time to explain this in detail to you anymore as I've already spent more time than I wanted to writing the rest of this.
> If I can, you can. I've even given examples with links to order pages. Not that I recommend FDCservers, mind you.
Uh still wrong, and not even close even if you include FDCservers.
1GBPS $2500/328717GB = $0.007/GB
10GBPS $15000/3287170GB = $0.004/GB
Where's the $0.001/GB?
A page asking you to contact their sales team is not an example. If you are buying transit you need to be in the proper DC and you need to colo. This is out of reach for most programmers that deploy on EC2 or Digital Ocean.
> How much money do you have on you? There's a bet I'd like to win.
You're probably going to make another flawed comparison that you can get tier 1 bandwidth lower than HE by buying some absurd amount of commit. Feel free to prove me wrong with actual quotes.
http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?s=8394951450d19c2...
Source? I've often wondered what this number is when viewed in aggregate across carriers - I can just never find it.
Better providers like L3 are around $3/Mbps, last I heard.
So $0.001 a GB means you'd only pay 33 cents per Mbps, which seems pretty low. But maybe at terabit commits, HE goes even lower.. I've only looked at 10G commits.
Just kidding. Seriously though, you are not going to see wholesale rates posted on a website. Contact your bandwidth provider and ask for a quote. For serious volumes and good pricing, expect to sign an NDA.
However, to give you an idea of lowend pricing here are some examples from FDCservers. This is not an endorsement, just a site with easily accessible prices that I could remember off the top of my head. In fact, I emphatically do not recommend them. There are much better providers both in terms of price and quality.
Remember 0.1 cents per GB equals about $0.30 per Mbps.
Asymmetrical 100G at $0.15 per Mbps https://fdcservers.net/ip-transit.php
Metered 10G at $0.60 per Mbps https://fdcservers.net/colocation.php
Unmetered 10G including server $500 https://fdcservers.net/dedicated-servers.php
AWS bandwidth usage is not an issue because when the traffic to my websites increases, my ad revenue increases too.
http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/05/comcast-plans-data-c...
We are the 98%! And charging the heavy users more makes our service cheaper.
Some of the people complaining here are elites – in technical and economic terms – and want poorer, less-sophisticated people to subsidize their outlier usage. And they're dressing this desire-for-handouts up in a righteous anger!
If they don't have competition, regulation can't always simulate the same consumer benefits, for a number of reasons. The regulators are often at the mercy of the regulated company. (The FCC, for example, is all telecom/lobbyist/party-functionary lawyers.) The regulated company tends to do fine, as their model and margins get frozen into slow-moving regulatory law. Smaller/newer companies with other models and technologies can't as easily fit into the regulatory mold, which often even bans them from offering the high-value (differentiated) services that could offer a competitive toehold. Can't have some upstart skimming off the cream from the now-tamed monopolist!
Which is why in all cases new competition, not formulaic rules from DC lawyers, should be the policy priority.
I think this argument conflates whether Comcast is too expensive with whether usage-based pricing is necessarily unfair.
Put another way, why is it ok to charge less for a capped speed but it isn't ok to charge less for a capped monthly transfer?
The best kind of rate raises are rate raises that don't look like a rate raise but effectively is one.
> Put another way, why is it ok to charge less for a capped speed but it isn't ok to charge less for a capped monthly transfer?
Because the monthly cap is far too low and the usage fees are ridiculously expensive. Combined with the fine print 95% of customers are worse off with a monthly capped transfer.
So is the complaint that usage fees are inherently wrong, or that Comcast is simply too expensive?
I don't agree that the price needs to have any relation to the wholesale cost, though. It's just price discrimination. Expensive shampoo doesn't cost more than cheap shampoo because of the ingredients.
Price discrimination is ok, if it in addition to providing a premium product also makes the good or product more affordable and available to another class of customers, thus creating a consumer surplus. Classic example: air travel.
Comcast's offering is a sham. It makes broadband more expensive for everyone. This is inherently worse.
For families the numbers seem sillier.
in swaths of the bay area, there is exactly one high speed provider