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

Sat Jan 13 11:33:37 UTC 2007

On Sat, 13 Jan 2007, Sean Donelan wrote:

> What happens if a 100Mbps port is $19.95/month with $1.95 per GB 
> transferred up and down?  Are P2P swarms as attractive?

$1.95 is outrageously expensive. Let's say we want to pass on our costs to 
the users with the highest usage:

1 megabit/s for a month is:

1/8*60*60*24*30=324000M=324 gigabytes

Let's say this 1 megabit/s costs us $20 (which is fairly high in most 
markets), that means the price of a gigabyte transferred should be $0.06, 
let's say we increase that (because of peak usage, administrative costs 
etc) to $0.2.

Now, let's include 35 gigs of traffic in each users alottment to get rid 
of usage based billing for most users (100 kilobit/s average usage) and 
add that to your above 100 meg port, and we end up with around $28, let's 
make that $29.95 a month including the 35 gigs. Hey, make it 50 gigs for 
good measure.

Now, my guess is that 90% of the users will never use more than 50 gigs, 
and if they do, their increased usage will be quite marginal, but if 
someone actually uses 5 megabit/s on average (1.6terabytes per month (not 
unheard of) that person will have to fork out some money ($300 extra per 
month).

Oh, this model would also require that you pay for bw you PRODUCE, not 
what you receive (since you cannot control that (DDoS, scanning etc)). So 
basically anyone sourcing material to the internet would have to pay in 
some way, the ones receiving wouldn't have to pay so much (only their 
monthly fee).

The bad part is that this model would most likely hinder a lot of 
content-producers from actually publishing their content, but on the other 
hand it might be a better deal to distribute content more closer to the 
customers as carriers might be inclined to let you put servers in their 
network that only can send traffic to their network, not anybody else. It 
might also preclude a model where carriers charge each other on the amount 
of incoming traffic they see from peers.

Personally, I don't think I want to see this but it does make sense in a 
economical/technical way, somewhat like road tolls.

-- 
Mikael Abrahamsson    email: swmike at swm.pp.se