3 ms·

What is a fair price for Internet service?

• sophacles 16y ago
  One potential serious bug in the argument of "data transit prices have come down from $.12/GB to $.03/GB" is that it doesn't mention capacity issues. Namely, there is a big difference between "the network running at capacity ten years ago had costs of X and the network running at capacity now has costs of Y" and "the network running at 50% capacity had costs of X and running at 100% now has costs of Y". Another serious flaw in this argument revolves around the question: where is the bottleneck? Is the problem in the routers/switches/etc in the switching/peering points? If so, a moderate capex would do some serious upgrading. Is it in the fiber, and is there still any dark-fiber? If so, again the capex is moderate to fix the problem. For both these the greedy is deplorable on the teleco's part. On the other hand, if the problem is "we need to run lots more fiber". Then the capex is large, and some more number crunching must be done, though at this point the cost of laying fiber should be considered much less risky than it used, as everyone will benefit from more capacity.