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Why is bandwidth pricing higher in Asia despite bandwidth rates there being among the highest in the world?
by Joakal 15y ago
Why is bandwidth pricing higher in Asia despite bandwidth rates there being among the highest in the world?
- davidu 15y agoYour question answers itself. I really don't know how much more to add, but I'll try. Transit (bandwidth) costs more there because: 1) Networks peer much less openly. 2) This is mostly due to the presence of state-run monopoly telcos. 3) That's why BW costs more. 4) Therefore, it costs more for AMZN to get transit in Asia. 5) This is why it costs more for AWS customers to use bandwidth. 6) This is why it costs more for you.
- Joakal 15y agoIt's more expensive per mbps in USA compared to Asia [0]. [0] http://www.billshrink.com/blog/5787/internet-penetration-costs/ http://www.billshrink.com/blog/5787/internet-penetration-cos... Edit: I'm assuming the data transfer rates apply to data leaving the data center in Japan -> Any computer, not USA region -> Japanese computer.
- davidu 15y agoThat's not talking about transit -- that's talking about consumer Internet connections, which are surprisingly cheap despite the same monopoly infrastructure but largely due to government price controls. That monopoly infrastructure, however, is what keeps outside providers from making inroads -- you don't see anyone but SingTel in Singapore, for instance. Or anyone besides Malaysia Telecom in Malaysia, or NTT / KDDI / etc. in Japan.
- Joakal 15y agoAh, makes sense, sort of. If there's government price controls, why was the internet monopoly company still increasing bandwidth when they are already leaders in worldwide bandwidth?
- davidu 15y agoGreat engineers? I have no idea. They make us look bad in the states though, so I say keep it up -- hopefully it'll motivate our guys to speed up my last mile.
- latch 15y agoIn HK, I pay around $22/m (USD) for 100mbps. I can download from steam or apple at 5-6+ MB/s. I can download torrents at 10MB/sec. However, when I download overseas (which is most of the time), I might get 200KB/sec (unless it's from a serious player in CA). The point? The high speed you hear about in Asia is a half truth. When you consider that some of the Internet doesn't exist here (Netflix, ...), high latency (for gaming) and geo-locked content (Kindle, ...), it's even less than a half truth. Anyways, where NA has poor last-mile infrastructure, Asia has poor intercontinental infrastructure. It's currently a scarce resource, thus prices are high.
- davidu 15y agoAsia has the intercontinental infrastructure, but the costs to connect are too high. SingTel, etc. all run monopolies that keep foreign networks out. Peering is a joke.
- shinratdr 15y agoHave you tried something that doesn't have the overhead of torrents and can make many concurrent connections like a local HK usenet server?
- latch 15y agoI've gone up to 10MB/sec...which is close enough to the theoretical limit of 100Mb/sec. Locally the product works as advertised. But only locally.
- shinratdr 15y ago> But only locally. Fair enough. I use Usenet almost exclusively at this point so I would love that. It's true though, I had this illusion of people with that kind of connection being able to connect to anyone on a quality server instantly.