[LINK] 'true' cost of bandwidth?
Richard Chirgwin
rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au
Sun May 3 13:39:59 AEST 2009
Scott Howard wrote:
> 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.
What about transit costs? If the content comes from someone else's network, you
don't get it for free. The argument is, as Scott said, completely bogus - in
fact, ignorant.
RC
>
> Scott
> _______________________________________________
> Link mailing list
> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
> http://mailman.anu.edu.au/mailman/listinfo/link
>
More information about the Link
mailing list