[LINK] 'true' cost of bandwidth?

[Leah Manta]

At 02:35 03/05/2009, you wrote:

>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.

I think they are specifically saying that "bits and bytes" on the 
wire cost nothing more or less than the cost of the wire.

If I have a 100 Mbps pipe and I put nothing over it, I'm still paying 
for a 100 Mbps pipe.  If I move 100 Mbps data across it, I'm still 
paying for a 100 Mbps pipe.

Years ago Data charging didn't exist in the USA.  It was about ports 
and pipes.  The port cost X and the pipe size cost Y.  Y was defined 
as the number of TDM slots needed to move your data from A to B.  The 
more data you needed to move over bigger pipes the more TDM slots you 
needed on the fibre and hence your share cost more.

But that doesn't mean DATA moving, or NOT moving, across the pipe costs more.

So why do we pay for data caps, and data transferred, when it's 
really irrelevant to the cost of providing the capacity in the first 
place.  Why not just pay a single flat monthly fee for capacity.

Cause "bytes" are smaller and the more bytes you sell the more money you make!