Why do some ISP's have bandwidth quotas?

Thu Oct 4 15:00:22 UTC 2007

On Thu, Oct 04, 2007 at 03:50:11PM +0100, Leigh Porter wrote:

 > Also there may be more tax costs, staff costs, equipment costs with
 > import duty etc which obviously means buying more equipment to support
 > more throughput costs more money.

The biggest issues are the transmission costs to get to the USA.

There are basically two cable systems, Southern Cross and AJC
(we'll ignore SEA-ME-WE-3 because you can only buy STM-1's on it,
and who wants to mess around with trivialities like that?)

Ask an economist what happens to prices in duopoly environments.
The cost of crossing the Pacific is north of US$200 per megabit
per month in .au, which I reckon is about ten times what it costs
you Europeans to get across the Atlantic (or what it costs the 
Japanese to cross the very same Pacific)

There are a few cable projects underway at the moment which
may break the duopoly, e.g.,
http://www.pipenetworks.com/docs/media/ASX_07_08_09%20Runway%20Update%204%20-%20BSa.pdf
I suspect we're going to have an interesting few years.

  - mark

-- 
Mark Newton                               Email:  newton at internode.com.au (W)
Network Engineer                          Email:  newton at atdot.dotat.org  (H)
Internode Systems Pty Ltd                 Desk:   +61-8-82282999
"Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton"  Mobile: +61-416-202-223