cost of doing business (was:Re: OpenTransit (france telecom) depeers cogent)
Mikael Abrahamsson
swmike at swm.pp.se
Sat Apr 16 16:32:40 UTC 2005
On Sat, 16 Apr 2005, Stephen J. Wilcox wrote:
> In general I'd prefer to operate in a healthy marketplace, where all
> parties are making money, theres little risk of the supplier filing
> bankrupcty and I am getting reasonable customers service. That can only
> lead to growth of the industry, healthy businesses and healthy
> economies. Unforunately none of these things appear to be happening at
> the moment...
Yes, it's quite interesting what has happened the past few years. I have
seen Cisco OC48E/POS-SR-SC cards on the used market sell at $3500 back in
2001/02, go up to $20k in 2004 and they seem to go for around $10-12k now.
I also did some other calculations. Let's say the average packet traverses
5 GSR-GSR links and you want to pay the CAPEX over 36 months and let's say
on average you fill half those with customer paying traffic. Let's assume
you get 50% discount from cisco on these cards and you want to build OC192
links:
List price for OC192 cards are $225k, you need 10 of them which with the
above equals 225000*10*.5=1125k.
At 1125k CAPEX you can carry 5gigabit/s of customer traffic, over 36
months this boils down to 1125000/36/5000=6.25.
So just the Cisco linecard CAPEX cost alone for this is $6 / megabit. With
the market price seemingly hovering around $15-25 / megabit/month in bulk,
this is a large portion of the total cost, considering DWDM systems and
people don't come cheap either.
So what will people do? Stop selling when their networks are full? Ignore
the economics and let other business carry the cost of bulk internet? Go
for cheaper platforms? Go bankrupt (if no other business can carry the
cost) ?
My guess is that going to OC768 isn't going to be very cheap either...
--
Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike at swm.pp.se
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