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In a country like Japan, it's decently easy for a company to run its own backbone and provide connectivity to, say, 80% of where a customer is going to be conne

by mdasen 18y ago

In a country like Japan, it's decently easy for a company to run its own backbone and provide connectivity to, say, 80% of where a customer is going to be connecting to with minimal investment. In the United States, you don't really have that option. Bandwidth is going to be expensive here. If you up people to 160Mbps service, you're going to need a ton more backend capacity and because you can't just create that capacity yourself, it's prohibitively expensive. Sure, lack of competition is a problem, but that's just an easy scapegoat. I mean, bandwidth at 10 cents per GB is really cheap bandwidth - cheaper than you'd get with most dedicated hosts. Part of what makes that expensive is that fiber has to go a long way to provide that bandwidth - if I'm downloading from NY to San Fran, that's a huge expanse to cover. In Japan, it would be a lot easier for companies providing bandwidth to consumers to also run their own backbone. Sure, competition is a problem in the US, but we're talking about having to do 20x as much cap-ex to cover the US. Anytime you have 20x greater costs, you need to expect that the product will reflect that. Saying that it's just competition is an easy way to be anti-corporate without addressing the issue - it costs a lot more to create and run the internet in the US; it doesn't cost a little bit more or 50% more, but orders of magnitude more because we're more spread out. We don't need to overcome a cost premium of 20%, but probably in excess of 1000% - and it's somewhat incredible that we aren't doing worse.

kiba 18y ago
Dude, the geography and distrubition of population in the US isn't uniform. Some cities are super-dense. Yet it doesn't mean that they will have really fast internet, since the cost of upgrading is a lot cheaper. What it cost to run line in a community is entirely different than what it cost to run in a city.
- mdasen 18y ago
  Yeah, but generally speaking carriers price things independent of cost. I'm guessing this is because it would be lethal to say, "you live in a less dense area, but we still serve you, just at twice the price." Plus, if you had read, a large part of the issue is that some places might be dense, but you're not connecting to servers within that dense area. If you live in Manhattan, you might live in a dense area, but the backend cost of connecting you to servers in Texas and California and laying (or paying for) a lot of fiber to do that. So, there's two costs. The cost of wiring a less dense population and the cost of backend wiring a larger geographic area where servers might be located. Even if you live in NYC, you still have the second cost.
  - deleted 18y ago
    [deleted]
  - pbz 18y ago
    1) The "backend cost" cannot be much more than what it is in Japan. They have to develop those networks as well. You make it sound like all the Japanese are actually accessing US servers. I would guess that the vast majority of the traffic is internal to the country. Yes, the distance is greater, but running "a few" high speed cables between the East and West coast is way cheaper than wiring a whole city. 2) You argue that you can't have one price for densely populated areas and another otherwise. In effect, this is exactly what it's happening, except that in those less dense areas you don't get service at all. Any way you slice it, you just can't add up the huge difference in what we're getting and what they're getting.
    - mindslight 18y ago
      No, his point is that a communications company in Japan can "wire the whole country" and peer with fellow network providers, while building such a comprehensive network in the US is prohibitive, and thus ISPs have to pay for transit. Basically, a bigger and more distributed (between "autonomous systems") network increases the asymmetry of the interconnections, leading to more billable events (antithesis of "the internet").
mindslight 18y ago
> If you up people to 160Mbps service, you're going to need a ton more backend capacity and because you can't just create that capacity yourself, it's prohibitively expensive Hadn't thought about this factor, and it's interesting food for thought. But wouldn't that only mean proper ISPs would limit external traffic (unlimited internal p2p) ? Now we're right back to that conflict of interest where the incumbents stall on providing commodity bits because they profit through proprietary services.

by mdasen 18y ago

kiba 18y ago

Dude, the geography and distrubition of population in the US isn't uniform. Some cities are super-dense. Yet it doesn't mean that they will have really fast internet, since the cost of upgrading is a lot cheaper. What it cost to run line in a community is entirely different than what it cost to run in a city.

mdasen 18y ago
Yeah, but generally speaking carriers price things independent of cost. I'm guessing this is because it would be lethal to say, "you live in a less dense area, but we still serve you, just at twice the price." Plus, if you had read, a large part of the issue is that some places might be dense, but you're not connecting to servers within that dense area. If you live in Manhattan, you might live in a dense area, but the backend cost of connecting you to servers in Texas and California and laying (or paying for) a lot of fiber to do that. So, there's two costs. The cost of wiring a less dense population and the cost of backend wiring a larger geographic area where servers might be located. Even if you live in NYC, you still have the second cost.
- deleted 18y ago
  [deleted]
- pbz 18y ago
  1) The "backend cost" cannot be much more than what it is in Japan. They have to develop those networks as well. You make it sound like all the Japanese are actually accessing US servers. I would guess that the vast majority of the traffic is internal to the country. Yes, the distance is greater, but running "a few" high speed cables between the East and West coast is way cheaper than wiring a whole city. 2) You argue that you can't have one price for densely populated areas and another otherwise. In effect, this is exactly what it's happening, except that in those less dense areas you don't get service at all. Any way you slice it, you just can't add up the huge difference in what we're getting and what they're getting.
  - mindslight 18y ago
    No, his point is that a communications company in Japan can "wire the whole country" and peer with fellow network providers, while building such a comprehensive network in the US is prohibitive, and thus ISPs have to pay for transit. Basically, a bigger and more distributed (between "autonomous systems") network increases the asymmetry of the interconnections, leading to more billable events (antithesis of "the internet").

mindslight 18y ago

> If you up people to 160Mbps service, you're going to need a ton more backend capacity and because you can't just create that capacity yourself, it's prohibitively expensive Hadn't thought about this factor, and it's interesting food for thought. But wouldn't that only mean proper ISPs would limit external traffic (unlimited internal p2p) ? Now we're right back to that conflict of interest where the incumbents stall on providing commodity bits because they profit through proprietary services.