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> 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 my
by 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?