4 ms·

You download 800MB/second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for $40 per month? Color me incredulous. Obviously you meant terabytes! 2TB/month I think is a lot to

by zaroth 7y ago

You download 800MB/second, 24 hours a day, 7 days a week, for $40 per month? Color me incredulous. Obviously you meant terabytes! 2TB/month I think is a lot to expect from a $40/month connection. The economics of that, in reality, is that your lower usage neighbors are heavily subsidizing your bandwidth costs.

esotericn 7y ago
This (terabytes, not petabytes) is a very standard connection here in Europe. You can drive across remote parts of Norway, Sweden etc and have 20mbit+ 4G (probably more if you had a high gain antenna). Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry.
- vinay427 7y ago
  There's far too much variance to have a European standard. I vaguely recall seeing bandwidth-capped plans in the country I'm living in now last time I was shopping for internet plans, but I'll have to check again. That 20 Mbit/s driving across remote areas probably wouldn't even hold true for Switzerland. But yes, overall I'd say the US definitely has worse home internet infrastructure (though it's unfortunately still not as bad as some other developed countries).
  - mitola 7y ago
    From my experience in Switzerland a lot of times holds true for me(in city however I can achieve a lot more then Mbit/s) But for sure it depends on location, but for now in the remote areas I have been there it worked like a charm. But recently in a relatively big city in US, i was at measly 5 Mbit/s. However I am sure there are as always areas with low or maybe even nonexistent coverage in any case in any country. But the percentage of that can cover widely practically speaking.
- sgt 7y ago
  You can also drive across other remote parts of Norway and find yourself limited to EDGE. I am not sure why you're making it sound like Norway has functional 4G/LTE all over, which is not the case.
- ryanmercer 7y ago
  >Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry. Sometimes I think Europeans have no real idea of how large the United States is. We have single states larger than several countries and single states with larger populations than several countries. - Norway is 148,728 square miles with 5.258 million people. - Sweden is 173,860 square miles with 9.995 million people. - The United States land area is 3,531,905 square miles with 327.2 million people. Of course we have a lower quality of infrastructure, 2 of our 50 states are individually larger than Sweden. California is larger than Norway with nearly 8 times the population
  - esotericn 7y ago
    Sure, the relevant comparison is roughly the US with all of Europe. It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though. We're not talking about the outback.
    - ryanmercer 7y ago
      >It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though. The internet isn't limited to a big city though, everything isn't mirrored in each large population center, that data has to cross vast distances. And population density increases the need for more and more cable to be deployed, if you're feeding a podunk town of 5,000 people but NYC has 28,000~ people per square mile, San Francisco 19,000~ people per square mile, Chicago 11,600~ people per square mile. Population dense areas are going to have a higher data consumption, a higher data consumption means you need that much more infrastructure at any given moment to handle peak. Then factor in the United States has the 3rd largest number of internet users in the world, an estimated 292 million [1] and it is much more difficult to serve them all with the same level of service in a country orders of magnitude smaller with orders of magnitude fewer people. The only country in Europe that begins to compare in both population and size is Russia at 1.8x larger land area and 44% of the population. Comparing physicall ysmall countries with 5-15 million. There are only 15 countries in Europe with populations over 10 million people, and only 1 of them (Russia) begins to come close to the US in size (being itself larger). The second largest country in Europe being The Ukraine and it's smaller than Texas. You simply can't compare internet infrastructure in a random European country to the United States. It's like saying "Smart Cars get 40mpg, I don't see why NASA's Crawler-Transporter can't do 40mpg too, sounds like bad design!" [1] https://internetworldstats.com/top20.htm https://internetworldstats.com/top20.htm
Numberwang 7y ago
My parents on the Swedish countryside has fiber up to the house and only use it for Facebook, just to balance things out. )
tmikaeld 7y ago
I meant 100TB/mo. But Bahnhof offers 10 000 Mbit/s.
- zaroth 7y ago
  How much does unmetered 10Gbps of back-end network transit cost? In the US at scale I think it would be around $5,000/month. That gives you peak capacity of 3PB but you can’t expect anything like perfect utilization. With a bit of hand-waving I would guess your provider’s transit cost is on the order of $3-5/TB/month... Even if EU geography brings this down to $1/TB/month, they are losing money on you. I seriously doubt it’s going to be on the order of $0.10/TB/month for transit. Contrast this with AWS bandwidth costs in Europe!
  - stefan_ 7y ago
    AWS transfer costs have no relation to this at all. They are fantasy numbers entirely disconnected to any sort of peering cost.
    - zaroth 7y ago
      That’s why most of my comment was regarding commercial transit costs. AWS is what bandwidth costs look like when it’s a profit center. I would certainly expect residential lines, with the extreme overhead of operating the service, to be priced closer to AWS rates than to baseline commercial transit rates.
tialaramex 7y ago
Somewhat, maybe. In the UK my ISP (which has excellent service but a small customer base, so it has actual quotas, not a faux "unlimited" service with some hidden usage policies) charges £45 pcm for the cheapest 200GB quota and £55 pcm for 2TB quota. So that means 1.8TB of quota comes to £10 pcm end user cost (ie that has their profit and taxes baked in). Maybe much less difference than you realised.
- qwsxyh 7y ago
  In the UK the "faux unlimited" providers actually are unlimited (source: downloaded about 14TiB over 3 months, nary a complaint)
- switch007 7y ago
  Just how long have you been with A&A? Usage policies aren't so hidden these days. You can easily find the link to the 1-2 page PDF on traffic management. If an ISP advertises unlimited, the usually mean it. I mean, of course, Virgin might have 29 unplanned maintenance events and "faults" over the course of a month, which might interrupt unlimited downloading

by zaroth 7y ago

esotericn 7y ago

This (terabytes, not petabytes) is a very standard connection here in Europe. You can drive across remote parts of Norway, Sweden etc and have 20mbit+ 4G (probably more if you had a high gain antenna). Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry.

vinay427 7y ago
There's far too much variance to have a European standard. I vaguely recall seeing bandwidth-capped plans in the country I'm living in now last time I was shopping for internet plans, but I'll have to check again. That 20 Mbit/s driving across remote areas probably wouldn't even hold true for Switzerland. But yes, overall I'd say the US definitely has worse home internet infrastructure (though it's unfortunately still not as bad as some other developed countries).
- mitola 7y ago
  From my experience in Switzerland a lot of times holds true for me(in city however I can achieve a lot more then Mbit/s) But for sure it depends on location, but for now in the remote areas I have been there it worked like a charm. But recently in a relatively big city in US, i was at measly 5 Mbit/s. However I am sure there are as always areas with low or maybe even nonexistent coverage in any case in any country. But the percentage of that can cover widely practically speaking.
sgt 7y ago
You can also drive across other remote parts of Norway and find yourself limited to EDGE. I am not sure why you're making it sound like Norway has functional 4G/LTE all over, which is not the case.
ryanmercer 7y ago
>Externally it sounds more like the US just has shit infrastructure, sorry. Sometimes I think Europeans have no real idea of how large the United States is. We have single states larger than several countries and single states with larger populations than several countries. - Norway is 148,728 square miles with 5.258 million people. - Sweden is 173,860 square miles with 9.995 million people. - The United States land area is 3,531,905 square miles with 327.2 million people. Of course we have a lower quality of infrastructure, 2 of our 50 states are individually larger than Sweden. California is larger than Norway with nearly 8 times the population
- esotericn 7y ago
  Sure, the relevant comparison is roughly the US with all of Europe. It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though. We're not talking about the outback.
  - ryanmercer 7y ago
    >It seems like tons of people here are talking about actual real big cities in the US that have microscopic caps, though. The internet isn't limited to a big city though, everything isn't mirrored in each large population center, that data has to cross vast distances. And population density increases the need for more and more cable to be deployed, if you're feeding a podunk town of 5,000 people but NYC has 28,000~ people per square mile, San Francisco 19,000~ people per square mile, Chicago 11,600~ people per square mile. Population dense areas are going to have a higher data consumption, a higher data consumption means you need that much more infrastructure at any given moment to handle peak. Then factor in the United States has the 3rd largest number of internet users in the world, an estimated 292 million [1] and it is much more difficult to serve them all with the same level of service in a country orders of magnitude smaller with orders of magnitude fewer people. The only country in Europe that begins to compare in both population and size is Russia at 1.8x larger land area and 44% of the population. Comparing physicall ysmall countries with 5-15 million. There are only 15 countries in Europe with populations over 10 million people, and only 1 of them (Russia) begins to come close to the US in size (being itself larger). The second largest country in Europe being The Ukraine and it's smaller than Texas. You simply can't compare internet infrastructure in a random European country to the United States. It's like saying "Smart Cars get 40mpg, I don't see why NASA's Crawler-Transporter can't do 40mpg too, sounds like bad design!" [1] https://internetworldstats.com/top20.htm https://internetworldstats.com/top20.htm

Numberwang 7y ago

My parents on the Swedish countryside has fiber up to the house and only use it for Facebook, just to balance things out. )

tmikaeld 7y ago

I meant 100TB/mo. But Bahnhof offers 10 000 Mbit/s.

zaroth 7y ago
How much does unmetered 10Gbps of back-end network transit cost? In the US at scale I think it would be around $5,000/month. That gives you peak capacity of 3PB but you can’t expect anything like perfect utilization. With a bit of hand-waving I would guess your provider’s transit cost is on the order of $3-5/TB/month... Even if EU geography brings this down to $1/TB/month, they are losing money on you. I seriously doubt it’s going to be on the order of $0.10/TB/month for transit. Contrast this with AWS bandwidth costs in Europe!
- stefan_ 7y ago
  AWS transfer costs have no relation to this at all. They are fantasy numbers entirely disconnected to any sort of peering cost.
  - zaroth 7y ago
    That’s why most of my comment was regarding commercial transit costs. AWS is what bandwidth costs look like when it’s a profit center. I would certainly expect residential lines, with the extreme overhead of operating the service, to be priced closer to AWS rates than to baseline commercial transit rates.

tialaramex 7y ago

Somewhat, maybe. In the UK my ISP (which has excellent service but a small customer base, so it has actual quotas, not a faux "unlimited" service with some hidden usage policies) charges £45 pcm for the cheapest 200GB quota and £55 pcm for 2TB quota. So that means 1.8TB of quota comes to £10 pcm end user cost (ie that has their profit and taxes baked in). Maybe much less difference than you realised.

qwsxyh 7y ago
In the UK the "faux unlimited" providers actually are unlimited (source: downloaded about 14TiB over 3 months, nary a complaint)
switch007 7y ago
Just how long have you been with A&A? Usage policies aren't so hidden these days. You can easily find the link to the 1-2 page PDF on traffic management. If an ISP advertises unlimited, the usually mean it. I mean, of course, Virgin might have 29 unplanned maintenance events and "faults" over the course of a month, which might interrupt unlimited downloading