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You can get IP transit for under a buck a Mbps. So your 100 meg line has a "cost" of $100 for shit-tier transit. Add better providers, now it's $200. Add last m

You can get IP transit for under a buck a Mbps. So your 100 meg line has a "cost" of $100 for shit-tier transit. Add better providers, now it's $200. Add last mile, support, etc... All of a sudden, no one wants to pay so much for residential. So it is disingenuous to complain that your top speed means you burn up your allocation. It's unlikely anyone is happy to pay per Mbps, so they gotta work out something which requires compromise. Now, the limits are tiny, the pricing nuts, etc., but it's not fundamentally a terrible model. On cell data, I'm very happy to buy per GB so I can decide how much to spend. The real downside is that capping users or offering low cap plans stifles innovation. It sounds nice to be able to "pay what you use" but that has a negative impact overall.

al_bundling 12y ago
> So your 100 meg line has a "cost" of $100 for shit-tier transit Wholesale rates from quality providers are about $0.30 per Mbps per month at 95th percentile. For paid transit, that is, and Comcast does a lot of peering which brings the cost down for them. So that's $30 per month for your 100M line, even if you run it full tilt all month and manage to hit only paid transit routes all the time. That's not too bad and most people use only a small fraction of their theoretical monthly throughput.
- seanp2k2 12y ago
  Honest question: what's stopping every larger apartment complex from getting a 10gbps line and paying for bandwidth, then offering that as an Internet option to residents (delivery via cat5)?
  - dsr_ 12y ago
    Two things: first, the costs cited above are for handoffs at major peering points, private or public. Pulling 10Gb/s across to your apartment complex is going to add a lot to the cost, if it can even be done (right of way issues). second, the expertise needed to realize that you can do this and then provide support for it is neither common nor cheap. If you had a tower on a nice highly-visible location (say, the giant Jesus statue in Rio) and could do line-of-sight laser links, that would be an extremely cost-effective solution. Sadly, that sort of opportunity is rare.
  - al_bundling 12y ago
    Not everybody wants to be an ISP. Not enough profit in it to make it worth it for the manager. Lack of backhaul and/or cost/difficulty of connecting to backhaul. Existing long term contracts of tennants. High turnover of tennants. Lack of scale.
  - lacksconfidence 12y ago
    some do, i used to live at a place served by https://webpass.net https://webpass.net which wires up larger apartment complexes with ethernet and runs as many fiber drops as necessary. They only operate in a limited area with specific kinds of buildings though.

al_bundling 12y ago

> So your 100 meg line has a "cost" of $100 for shit-tier transit Wholesale rates from quality providers are about $0.30 per Mbps per month at 95th percentile. For paid transit, that is, and Comcast does a lot of peering which brings the cost down for them. So that's $30 per month for your 100M line, even if you run it full tilt all month and manage to hit only paid transit routes all the time. That's not too bad and most people use only a small fraction of their theoretical monthly throughput.

seanp2k2 12y ago
Honest question: what's stopping every larger apartment complex from getting a 10gbps line and paying for bandwidth, then offering that as an Internet option to residents (delivery via cat5)?
- dsr_ 12y ago
  Two things: first, the costs cited above are for handoffs at major peering points, private or public. Pulling 10Gb/s across to your apartment complex is going to add a lot to the cost, if it can even be done (right of way issues). second, the expertise needed to realize that you can do this and then provide support for it is neither common nor cheap. If you had a tower on a nice highly-visible location (say, the giant Jesus statue in Rio) and could do line-of-sight laser links, that would be an extremely cost-effective solution. Sadly, that sort of opportunity is rare.
- al_bundling 12y ago
  Not everybody wants to be an ISP. Not enough profit in it to make it worth it for the manager. Lack of backhaul and/or cost/difficulty of connecting to backhaul. Existing long term contracts of tennants. High turnover of tennants. Lack of scale.
- lacksconfidence 12y ago
  some do, i used to live at a place served by https://webpass.net https://webpass.net which wires up larger apartment complexes with ethernet and runs as many fiber drops as necessary. They only operate in a limited area with specific kinds of buildings though.