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From very early in our history, this is something my cofounder Michelle often said. It’s fascinating how the economics and incentives of bandwidth change with s
by eastdakota 5y ago
From very early in our history, this is something my cofounder Michelle often said. It’s fascinating how the economics and incentives of bandwidth change with scale. Figuring that out early was key to our success and continues to inform our strategy.
The other interesting thing is not all bandwidth is created equal. We provide services like 1.1.1.1 and infrastructure to root server operators in order to have a “currency” that’s helpful to ISPs who invite us into their networks. The number of times we’ve gotten invited into some telecom’s network because the network admin’s favorite sports team (or whatever) uses the free version of our service is… fascinating. And since every server in our network runs every service, once we’re in for one thing means everything we do in the region gets better and less expensive to operate.
This means, counter intuitively, as we add more locations to our network our costs generally go down, not up.
- sitkack 5y agoHow much space and power do you get access into the ISP locations you are in? Are we talking single 4u and 8a? Or full racks, I suppose the answer is always, "it depends." What does the hardware side of CF look like? You must be toying with custom silicon. It always baffled me that regional ISPs weren't selling that last mile bandwidth to customers for real dollars. Even over DSL lines in the late 90s one could have run an amazing VoD service.
- eastdakota 5y agoIt depends, as you said. You can look at our network map and get some sense of where we likely have a little vs a lot of equipment: https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ https://www.cloudflare.com/network/ But we deploy enough equipment to meet local demand (so will roughly correlate to population served). And that makes sense for ISPs to support because the alternative is them paying for back haul bandwidth themselves.
- aidenn0 5y agoAbout 8 years ago there was bruhaha with some ISPs charging Netflix (or their CDNs at least) for peering; is that something that cloudflare has run into? Given the rather large margins of home ISPs, it seems like they have you over a barrel if they set the price point sufficiently below the cost of transit without peering...