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Maybe this is a stupid question, but why is google paying for bandwidth at all? Why doesn't google own their own bandwidth provider? Didn't they buy up a bunc
by blhack 17y ago
Maybe this is a stupid question, but why is google paying for bandwidth at all?
Why doesn't google own their own bandwidth provider? Didn't they buy up a bunch of dark fiber a while ago?
Lease it to the providers and use that to subsidize their own bandwidth. Or am I totally missing the point?
- philwelch 17y agoIf Google had their own bandwidth (hell, their own Tier 1/2 network is feasible) it might provide them too great a temptation to do evil.
- chrisbolt 17y agoThey're probably already doing settlement-free peering with various ISPs due to their sheer volume of data transfer, which would mean that they aren't paying for all of the bandwidth they're using. Otherwise, the ISPs they're peering with would have to pay someone else for the bandwidth to use YouTube.
- rbranson 17y agoGoogle probably has SOME connectivity they pay for, but by now they are effectively their own Tier 1 network, considering how much Internet traffic flows to their servers. They have a 2-byte ASN, which basically means they're a major backbone network. ISPs drool at the chance to peer with Google and get tariff-free YouTube/Google traffic, which probably constitutes a significant chunk of their overall volume. Considering that Google has all of these little mini-datacenters spread throughout major colo facilities, a ton of the edge-to-edge traffic probably flows over in-building GigE or 10GigE. It probably costs them a penny per TB delivered to a peered ISP rather than $.05/GB us peons pay at the colo. The ~8mbit multi-T1 connection at my office amounts to about 38 cents per gigabyte in or out if we use it at 100% capacity 24/7/365. That's still more expensive than the 250GB capped Comcast user, who's effectively paying about 20 cents per gigabyte.