Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

Wed Jan 10 15:58:04 UTC 2007

Will Hargrave wrote:
> Michael.Dillon at btradianz.com wrote:
>
>   
>> I have to admit that I have no idea how BT charges
>> ISPs for wholesale ADSL. If there is indeed some kind
>> of metered charging then Internet video will be a big
>> problem for the business model. 
>>     
> They vary, it depends on what pricing model has been selected.
>
> http://tinyurl.com/yjgsum has BT Central pipe pricing. Note those are
> prices, not telephone numbers. ;-)
>
> If you convert into per-megabit charges - at least an order of magnitude
> greater than the cost of transit, and at least a couple of orders of
> magnitude more than peering/partial transit.
>   
A cursory look at the document doesn't seem to show any prices above 
622Mbps, but for that you're looking at about £160,000 a year or 
£21/Mbps/month.

2GB per day, equates to 190Kbps (assuming a perfectly even distribution 
pattern, which of course would never happen), which would be £3.98 a 
month per user. In reality I imagine that you could see usage peaking at 
about 3 times the average, or considerably greater if large flash crowd 
events occur.

I would say that in the UK market today, those sorts of figures are 
enough to destroy current margins, but certainly not high enough that 
the costs couldn't be passed onto the end user as part of an "Internet 
TV" package.
> p2p is no panacea to get around these charges; in the worst case p2p
> traffic will just transit your central pipe twice, which means the
> situation is worse with p2p not better.
>
> For a smaller UK ISP, I do not know if there is a credible wholesale LLU
> alternative to BT.
>   
Both Bulldog (C&W) and Easynet sell wholesale LLU via an L2TP handoff. 
It's been a while since I was in that game so any prices I have will be 
out of date by now, but IIRC both had the option to pay them per line 
_or_ for a central pipe style model. The per line prices were just about 
low enough to remain competitve, with the central pipe being cheaper for 
volume (but of course, only because you'd currently need to buy far less 
bandwidth than the total of all the lines in use; most ASDL users 
consume a surprisingly small amount of bandwidth and they aggregate very 
well).
> Note this information is of course completely UK-centric. A more
> regionalised model (21CN?!) would change the situation.
>
> Will
>
>   
S