Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

Thu Dec 16 18:20:36 UTC 2010

On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Dave Temkin <davet1 at gmail.com> wrote:
> I disagree.  Even at $1/Mbit and 6Tbit of traffic (they do more), that's
> still $72M/year in revenue that they weren't recognizing before.  Given that
> that traffic was actually *costing* them money to absorb before, turning the
> balance and making that kind of money would be very favorably looked upon in

Yeah, because it makes a lot of sense to fuck with a billion dollar a
month revenue stream so you can extract a few million dollars more per
month from IP carriers.  This definitely makes more sense than, say,
running the billion dollar a month side a little more efficiently.

You need to understand the scale of comcast's expenses and revenue on
the access and transport side of their business, in order to have a
remotely intelligent opinion about whether or not they are doing
anything smart with the peering/transit side, in these conditions.

If you really think it's a good idea to attract the attention of
government regulators, newspapers, customers, and every major ISP by
making a lot of noise over something that might allow you to make 0.5%
more money off a product where you could probably save an order of
magnitude more money through any number of ignored efficiencies within
the organization, I would love for you to post that.  I suspect that
most folks who are of the opinion that Comcast is motivated by
anything but the three things I mentioned have not clearly considered
the proportionately small benefit they could gain from selling access
to their network at anything approaching a nominal fee.  It must be
either 1) very high per-Mb price; 2) ego and stupidity; 3) greed of
such magnitude that it would make Gordon Gecko proud.

-- 
Jeff S Wheeler <jsw at inconcepts.biz>
Sr Network Operator  /  Innovative Network Concepts