5 ms·

ISPs could not be profitable if end users started reselling bandwidth while paying flatrate fees. They'd be forced to enforce volume caps.

by brazzy 17y ago

marcamillion 17y ago
That's interesting brazzy, but I think we would be surprised with the results of such a project. For example, if I were a user and this was available to me, I would have multiple ISP accounts and boxes. I imagine many others would do the same. I also think, an interesting side-effect would be a reduction in piracy. The way to cure piracy is not to sue everybody that pirates, the way to do it is to create an explicit opportunity cost for your time/bandwidth/storage. If I know that for every GB I pirate, I lose $1/month (or whatever the figure turns out to be) that changes my decision making process. So I figure that yes, along the limit (i.e. approaching infinity), assuming no one pirates and all customers are a CDN peer, the ISPs might not be profitable. But, I think we would see some very interesting social behavior changes before then, that the ISPs might be able to benefit from.
- brazzy 17y ago
  ISPs would lose money on those accounts at current rates, so they'd have to make them so expensive that the user pays more money for bandwidth than he gets from the CDN. Would you have multiple ISP accounts paying perhaps $20 from the CDN when they cost you $400 each? Because that's how much they'd have to cost based on what little percentage of the bandwidth price the user gets in that spreadsheet. As for the anti-piracy argument, Have you actually looked at the numbers? It assumes $0.02 per GB bandwidth fee to the user - I doubt many people pirate movies they consider worth less thant 2 cents. And no, jacking up the bandwidth fee would not change the picture much. The point is that CDNs are already paying ISPs for bandwidth. There is no money to be made paying users, who get their bandwidth from ISPs, period. And storage fees would have to be relative to available bandwidth because 2TB storage on a 1MBit line is worth much less to the CDN than on a 100Mbit line.
milkshakes 17y ago
i think the point was to reduce transit traffic between providers. "local" mirrors accomplish that. regardless, users still have underutilized bandwidth, capped or not. why not resell it?
- brazzy 17y ago
  Even if you could have a very smart network where only users within the same ISP exchange data (this not incurring peering fees), all that data still needs to be routed and transported between the ISP's access points, a cost that scales up with usage. If all users started using all of their bandwidth (or a larger portion of it than they do now), costs for the ISP would go up, and they would have to pass that on to the users. Earning $5 per month from reselling bandwidth is not so attractive when it means your ISP bill goes up $20. The business plan does not account for this. It assumes bandwidth to cost the users nothing, which only is true now because of flat fees, which are only viable when users use a very limited portion of the total available bandwidth.
  - milkshakes 17y ago
    all that data still needs to be routed and transported between the ISP's access points, a cost that scales up with usage. isn't this happening anyway?
jerf 17y ago
As you say: second-order effects. If user home broadband connections are being sold cheaply enough to be able to be resold for a profit, the ISPs will either raise the price to recoup this (the value of the connection has gone up to you and therefore you will be willing to pay more), or cut out the middleman and directly provide these services with their bandwidth (forbidding end users from participating), pocketing the money. This entire plan hinges on the ISPs doing nothing in response. And the responses the ISPs would make aren't even "evil" or anything, it would just be rational market behavior on their part. Furthermore, there would be major quality issues. Clever programming and design could make this work with enough redundancy in the system that even as people log in and out the content wouldn't disappear, but this does not come for free. You must pay a price somewhere else: increased latency (one of the most likely outcomes, many P2P systems make this tradeoff), decreased bandwidth, grotesque requirements for content replication that goes a long ways towards mitigating the capacity of the system. You can often trade one kind of quality for another, but you can't increase the total quality available, and a home consumer broadband connection is a low-quality connection for this purpose. And the quality of home connections aggregates distinctly sublinearly, especially since so many of them are badly asymmetric. This is a terrible idea and anybody going into it will lose everything they invest, excepting the IMHO faint possibility that some interesting technology could emerge that could eventually be repurposed for something sane. (I call this a faint possibility because that would then be facing competition from technologies directly purposed for whatever this later domain is and given the likelihood of a large difference between the initial design constraints and the final design constraints you're likely to have a very inferior solution.)
- milkshakes 17y ago
  I still don't understand why this is a terrible idea. Is there absolutely no way for ISPs to react to this in such a way that they save money rather than lose it? If decreasing traffic between providers doesn't save money, then wouldn't there be some savings at least from decreasing traffic between subnets?
  - brazzy 17y ago
    CDNs don't scale down that well. The likelihood that there is demand for one particular piece of data within the same subnet (and thus the value of having it there) decreases dramatically with the size of the subnet. As the article itself points out, some CDNs already do this with large ISPs, directly. This kind of thing may increase and get more sophisticated, but it will never include the users themselves as middle men.
grogers 17y ago
Maybe, but have they yet? Until the concept becomes massively popular, there is still a business opportunity. Keep in mind also, that it only matters that the end users get more money from their bandwidth than it costs them to buy it from their ISP. As long as operating a distributed CDN node is more valuable than just the bandwidth to drive it, then there is still a business model. That added value is from the spare disk/cpu the end user would be contributing. In that case ISPs might jump into it themselves, but I still see that happening only after the idea became massively popular.
eli 17y ago
Also note that most home users have asynchronous connections -- uploads are often an order of magnitude slower than downloads
- nkohari 17y ago
  Nitpick: it's "asymmetric". Good point though.
  - eli 17y ago
    Doh. It's been a long day.

ISPs could not be profitable if end users started reselling bandwidth while paying flatrate fees. They'd be forced to enforce volume caps.

by brazzy 17y ago

ISPs could not be profitable if end users started reselling bandwidth while paying flatrate fees. They'd be forced to enforce volume caps.

marcamillion 17y ago

That's interesting brazzy, but I think we would be surprised with the results of such a project. For example, if I were a user and this was available to me, I would have multiple ISP accounts and boxes. I imagine many others would do the same. I also think, an interesting side-effect would be a reduction in piracy. The way to cure piracy is not to sue everybody that pirates, the way to do it is to create an explicit opportunity cost for your time/bandwidth/storage. If I know that for every GB I pirate, I lose $1/month (or whatever the figure turns out to be) that changes my decision making process. So I figure that yes, along the limit (i.e. approaching infinity), assuming no one pirates and all customers are a CDN peer, the ISPs might not be profitable. But, I think we would see some very interesting social behavior changes before then, that the ISPs might be able to benefit from.

brazzy 17y ago
ISPs would lose money on those accounts at current rates, so they'd have to make them so expensive that the user pays more money for bandwidth than he gets from the CDN. Would you have multiple ISP accounts paying perhaps $20 from the CDN when they cost you $400 each? Because that's how much they'd have to cost based on what little percentage of the bandwidth price the user gets in that spreadsheet. As for the anti-piracy argument, Have you actually looked at the numbers? It assumes $0.02 per GB bandwidth fee to the user - I doubt many people pirate movies they consider worth less thant 2 cents. And no, jacking up the bandwidth fee would not change the picture much. The point is that CDNs are already paying ISPs for bandwidth. There is no money to be made paying users, who get their bandwidth from ISPs, period. And storage fees would have to be relative to available bandwidth because 2TB storage on a 1MBit line is worth much less to the CDN than on a 100Mbit line.

milkshakes 17y ago

i think the point was to reduce transit traffic between providers. "local" mirrors accomplish that. regardless, users still have underutilized bandwidth, capped or not. why not resell it?

brazzy 17y ago
Even if you could have a very smart network where only users within the same ISP exchange data (this not incurring peering fees), all that data still needs to be routed and transported between the ISP's access points, a cost that scales up with usage. If all users started using all of their bandwidth (or a larger portion of it than they do now), costs for the ISP would go up, and they would have to pass that on to the users. Earning $5 per month from reselling bandwidth is not so attractive when it means your ISP bill goes up $20. The business plan does not account for this. It assumes bandwidth to cost the users nothing, which only is true now because of flat fees, which are only viable when users use a very limited portion of the total available bandwidth.
- milkshakes 17y ago
  all that data still needs to be routed and transported between the ISP's access points, a cost that scales up with usage. isn't this happening anyway?

jerf 17y ago

As you say: second-order effects. If user home broadband connections are being sold cheaply enough to be able to be resold for a profit, the ISPs will either raise the price to recoup this (the value of the connection has gone up to you and therefore you will be willing to pay more), or cut out the middleman and directly provide these services with their bandwidth (forbidding end users from participating), pocketing the money. This entire plan hinges on the ISPs doing nothing in response. And the responses the ISPs would make aren't even "evil" or anything, it would just be rational market behavior on their part. Furthermore, there would be major quality issues. Clever programming and design could make this work with enough redundancy in the system that even as people log in and out the content wouldn't disappear, but this does not come for free. You must pay a price somewhere else: increased latency (one of the most likely outcomes, many P2P systems make this tradeoff), decreased bandwidth, grotesque requirements for content replication that goes a long ways towards mitigating the capacity of the system. You can often trade one kind of quality for another, but you can't increase the total quality available, and a home consumer broadband connection is a low-quality connection for this purpose. And the quality of home connections aggregates distinctly sublinearly, especially since so many of them are badly asymmetric. This is a terrible idea and anybody going into it will lose everything they invest, excepting the IMHO faint possibility that some interesting technology could emerge that could eventually be repurposed for something sane. (I call this a faint possibility because that would then be facing competition from technologies directly purposed for whatever this later domain is and given the likelihood of a large difference between the initial design constraints and the final design constraints you're likely to have a very inferior solution.)

milkshakes 17y ago
I still don't understand why this is a terrible idea. Is there absolutely no way for ISPs to react to this in such a way that they save money rather than lose it? If decreasing traffic between providers doesn't save money, then wouldn't there be some savings at least from decreasing traffic between subnets?
- brazzy 17y ago
  CDNs don't scale down that well. The likelihood that there is demand for one particular piece of data within the same subnet (and thus the value of having it there) decreases dramatically with the size of the subnet. As the article itself points out, some CDNs already do this with large ISPs, directly. This kind of thing may increase and get more sophisticated, but it will never include the users themselves as middle men.

grogers 17y ago

Maybe, but have they yet? Until the concept becomes massively popular, there is still a business opportunity. Keep in mind also, that it only matters that the end users get more money from their bandwidth than it costs them to buy it from their ISP. As long as operating a distributed CDN node is more valuable than just the bandwidth to drive it, then there is still a business model. That added value is from the spare disk/cpu the end user would be contributing. In that case ISPs might jump into it themselves, but I still see that happening only after the idea became massively popular.

eli 17y ago

Also note that most home users have asynchronous connections -- uploads are often an order of magnitude slower than downloads

nkohari 17y ago
Nitpick: it's "asymmetric". Good point though.
- eli 17y ago
  Doh. It's been a long day.