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It would be more interesting to compare the cost along with the total bandwidth. It's very expensive to fuel a 747 for a trans-Atlantic flight, but the informa
by amalcon 16y ago
It would be more interesting to compare the cost along with the total bandwidth. It's very expensive to fuel a 747 for a trans-Atlantic flight, but the information density should be high enough to make the cost comparison interesting.
- bd 16y agoVery rough estimate based on passenger ticket prices gives about $20 per GB/s. SF <-> London is about $1,200 for return ticket (Kayak) 747 can have about 400 passengers bandwidth is 12 TB/s (from the post) 400*1200/2 = $240,000 cost of flight $240K / 12,000 GB/s = $20 per GB/s This should be an upper bound. I assume flying cargo (bought in bulk) would be significantly cheaper than flying people with individually bought tickets.
- amalcon 16y ago$20/GB/s for ten hours. If you want to compare to bandwidth prices, it has to be scaled up to a month: 24*30/10 = 72 flights/month $1440 per month per GB/s Like, you, I suspect it would be significantly cheaper than this, but that calculation would require data I don't have.
- bd 16y agoAh, yes. For the lower bound, we can estimate just the price of fuel (no plane amortization, crew and ground personnel costs, airport taxes, etc). This seems to be currently about $54K per flight (London to San Francisco). 747 burns about 5 gallons per mile LHR to SFO is 5,367 miles current jet fuel price is 201.1 cts/gallon 5367*5*2 = $53,670 So monthly price per GB/s should be somewhere between $322 - $1,440.