cost of doing business

Sun Apr 17 17:54:52 UTC 2005

>> Mikael Abrahamsson <swmike at swm.pp.se> wrote:

>> Let's say for the sake of argument that by 2010 we want to give every 
>> household 5 megabit/s on average. How could this be done with technology 
>> today seen on the radar? Remember that the households should want to pay 
>> for the bandwidth as well, meaning they might be willing to pay $30 per 
>> month for the bandwidth part (this is kind of high, but let's go with it). 

> Randy Bush <randy at psg.com> wrote:

> fwiw, 100mb to the home costs about that in japan

We are talking of two different things here, traffic versus access bandwidth.
It will be a while before the average household generates 5 megabit/s traffic.
Even in Korea and Hong Kong, where the average broadband link is in the
5-10 Mbps range, average traffic is about 0.1 Mbps.  The main purpose of
high speed links is to get low transaction latency (as in "I want that Web
page on my screen NOW," or "I want that song for transfer to my portable
device NOW"), so utilizations are low.

Andrew Odlyzko