Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Thu Dec 16 19:39:01 UTC 2010

On Dec 16, 2010, at 10:53 AM, Dave Temkin wrote:

> Jeff Wheeler wrote:
>> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Dave Temkin <davet1 at gmail.com> wrote:
>>  
>>> I disagree.  Even at $1/Mbit and 6Tbit of traffic (they do more), that's
>>> still $72M/year in revenue that they weren't recognizing before.  Given that
>>> that traffic was actually *costing* them money to absorb before, turning the
>>> balance and making that kind of money would be very favorably looked upon in
>>>    
>> 
>> Yeah, because it makes a lot of sense to fuck with a billion dollar a
>> month revenue stream so you can extract a few million dollars more per
>> month from IP carriers.  This definitely makes more sense than, say,
>> running the billion dollar a month side a little more efficiently.
>> 
>> You need to understand the scale of comcast's expenses and revenue on
>> the access and transport side of their business, in order to have a
>> remotely intelligent opinion about whether or not they are doing
>> anything smart with the peering/transit side, in these conditions.
>>  
> 
> I do.  And yes, they are happy to "fuck with a billion dollar a month revenue stream" (that happens to be low margin) in order to set a precedent so that when traffic is 60Tbit instead of 6Tbit, across the *same* customer base they have today that's insisting on getting that $19.99/month promo deal for life they make up the infrastructure investment on the backs of the content providers and not their customers.   $1B/month from your customers + $1B/month from your content providers is what they'd ideally like to see and this is just laying the groundwork for it.
> 
> They have a captive audience.  What percentage of their customers who they're offering 10Mbit+ connections to do you think have a 10Mbit+ alternative?  It's not very many.
> 
> 
> -Dave

Well said, Dave... I've been mostly ignoring this thread in recent days because
I had pretty much said my piece. However, if people still aren't understanding
that Comcast is attempting to leverage a monopoly here for anti-competitive
ends, it boggles the mind.

Level3 is no angel, either. IMHO, both organizations are posterchildren for
burdensome regulation (no, I'm not a fan of burdensome regulation).

The world needs more open peering policies and denser connection between
networks. Recouping access costs on the backs of content providers is
absurd. So is trying to recoup the costs of content delivery on the backs
of access networks (Level3's traditional model).

I suspect that is what will happen in the long run. THe question now is whether
it will happen through cooperative competition as is the tradition of the
internet, or, whether these bozos will force the government into turning it
into a system like the telco settlements that made telephony so expensive
for so long.

Owen