[LINK] 'true' cost of bandwidth?

[David Goldstein]

It helps to read the New York Times article before criticising the grand old lady. See http://nytimes.com/2009/04/20/business/20isp.html.

David



----- Original Message ----
From: Richard Chirgwin <rchirgwin at ozemail.com.au>
To: link at anu.edu.au
Sent: Sunday, 3 May, 2009 1:39:59 PM
Subject: Re: [LINK] 'true' cost of bandwidth?

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
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> Link at mailman.anu.edu.au
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> 

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