Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Wed Dec 15 18:28:23 UTC 2010

On 12/15/2010 05:09 AM, ML wrote:
>
>> According to:
>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast
>> "Comcast has 15.930 million high-speed internet customers"
>>
>> If a 10G port for transit is paid by comcast $30/Mbit/s monthly
>> that's 0.19 cent/internet customer/month for a new 10G port
>> to properly desaturate this particular link.
>>
>> Did I compute something wrong?
>>
>> Laurent
>
> Assuming that I did my math right.
>
> It's actually 1.9 cents/month/per customer.
>
> Assuming they pay $30/meg...
>
Probably preaching to the choir here but there are a lot more costs than 
that involved.  It's all right having the bandwidth at transit points, 
but you've got to be able to get the bandwidth to the customers 
locations.  With no idea of what Comcast's distribution is like for all 
we know the graph could be one transit point in one area of the country 
and indicative of poor localised behaviour rather than centralised.  
Virgin Media were notorious in various cities in the UK for 
over-saturating the local network.  Out in the towns and smaller cities 
you'd be okay and have no problem saturating a 20Mb line, but often 
whole areas of London, Manchester and the like would suffer high 
latency, packet loss and so on during 'peak' hours because they would 
over sell their infrastructure (12am-10am fine, then steadily worse 
until unusable come the evening).  They only seemed to add more capacity 
to the areas when enough people complained.

IMO two network graphs are next to useless out of context.

Paul