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You're talking about changes in absolute costs. I'm talking about relative costs. It doesn't matter how good networking equipment gets. It will always cost prov
by harryh 9y ago
You're talking about changes in absolute costs. I'm talking about relative costs. It doesn't matter how good networking equipment gets. It will always cost providers more money to service users saturating their connections than more typical consumers that don't saturate but care about burst speed.
For every poor kid in Chicago that happens to be using a highly above average amount of total bandwidth per month there will be 50 poor kids in Chicago with more typical usage patterns that your plan would hurt.
- staunch 9y ago> It will always cost providers more money to service users saturating their connections ... I don't think it's an accident that so many people believe this myth. It sounds logical enough but it's completely false. Fact #1 You have to replace technology because it fails over time. Fact #2 The cost of networking technology is decreasing every year. Fact #3. The performance of networking technology increasing every year. Fact #4 The costs of running fiber to premises is a (mostly) one-time expense. There's no reason that users couldn't have more bandwidth for less money every year. Technology is magical like this.
- harryh 9y agoNone of those facts contradict my point as they, again, speak towards absolute rather than relative costs. Providers have a finite amount of bandwidth in their trunk connections. More bursty users can use a single trunk than saturating users. Therefore saturating users are more expensive. It's just like CPU. If you're bursting up to capacity but on average only using, say, 10% of available CPU then Amazon can pack more of your workloads on a single physical machine compared to a different user that is using 100% of CPU all the time. The fact the CPUs are always getting cheaper and faster doesn't negate this point.
- staunch 9y agoAmazon has dropped the price of compute power many times for precisely the same reasons I'm describing. https://www.cloudyn.com/blog/analyzing-aws-ec2-price-drops-over-the-past-5-years/ https://www.cloudyn.com/blog/analyzing-aws-ec2-price-drops-o... This is exactly what would be happening if Comcast and AT&T had competition or smart regulation.
- harryh 9y agoYou keep talking about absolute, not relative, costs. I don't know why you keep doing this.
- icebraining 9y agoAre you saying Comcast and AT&T charge the same price per mbps they always did?