[LINK] 'true' cost of bandwidth?

[Scott Howard]

On Sat, May 2, 2009 at 5:34 PM, Jan Whitaker <jwhit at janwhitaker.com> wrote:

> narramissic links to IT World's A Layman's Guide to Bandwidth
> Pricing, writing
>
[...]

> "For instance, Comcast
> says it costs them $6.85 per home to double the internet capacity of
> a neighborhood. But the bit of the Times article that we should


I think you'll find this refers to the cost of the access hardware involved,
and is not related to any additional bandwidth which might be used as a
result.

commit to memory is this:'If all Time Warner customers decided one
> day not to check their e-mail or download a single movie, the
> company's costs would be no different than on a day when every
> customer was glued to the screen watching one YouTube video after
> another.'"


What a completely bogus argument.  I'd expect that of Slashdot, but not of
the NY Times.  This is equivalent to claiming that if one day everyone
decided to avoid Victoria Road in Sydney, then the cost to the government
would be exactly the same as on a day when the entire Sydney population
tried to use it.  That statement is completely true, of course, but it's
also completely irrelevant to the true cost of maintaining the
infrastructure involved.

  Scott