Hacker News Reader

$4.4 Billion is the equivalent of 7.3 Trillion free hours of AOL service via promotional cd-rom.

Assuming you get 1000 hours per CD, you're saying CDs cost about $1.65.

You could probably get CDs in bulk for an order of magnitude or two cheaper. Assuming the CDs are $0.01, that's 440 trillion free hours. Great deal for Verizon.

On the other hand, with dial up at ~50kb/s, and the top-end Verizon FiOS running at 150Mb/s, that 440 trillion free hours of dialup is only 146 billion hours of FiOS, or $33/hour of FiOS 150Mb/s, or, put in the way that the market usually charges for bandwidth, approx $24,000/month for 150Mb/s bandwidth. That is way more than the going rate for that sort of bandwidth.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com