On Sat, Oct 06, 2007 at 10:16:16AM -0500, Joe Greco wrote:
So to run the numbers: A customer who averages .25Mbit/sec on a tail acquired from the incumbent requires --
Port/line rental from the telco ~ $50 IP transit ~ $ 6 (your number) Transpacific backhaul ~ $50 (I'm not making this up)
These look like great places for some improvement.
Of course. Transpacific backhaul may drop in price once the AJC/Southern Cross duopoly is broken. Perhaps 2009, we'll have to see. Port/line rental? Ha. We have an incumbent telco who owns 100% of the copper local loop, who is so aggressive about protecting their monopoly that they've actually sued the Federal Government to obtain relief from the requirement to offer wholesale access to the local loop to their competitors. The competition regulator has recently imposed an order on them to drop their price of access to the raw copper; The incumbent's response has been to initiate a national political debate during the present federal election campaign campaign over the merits of a nation-wide Fiber-To-The-Node network which, just coincidentally, requires the exclusion of competition to make the numbers in the business case add up. So I wouldn't be holding my breath about that one.
Like I said a few messages ago, as much as your marketplace derides caps and quotas, I'm pretty sure that most of you would prefer to do business with my constraints than with yours.
That's nice from *your* point of view, as an ISP, but from the end-user's point of view, it discourages the development and deployment of the next killer app, which is the point that I've been making.
Generalizing: We're living in an environment where European service providers use DPI boxes to shape just about everyone to about 40 Gbytes per month, and where US service providers have enough congestion in their reticulation networks that the phrase "unlimited access" carries ironic overtones, and where Australian and New Zealand service providers give uncongested access at unconstrained ADSL2+ rates for as much capacity as an end user is prepared to pay for, and Asian ISPs where in-country is cheap but international is slow and expensive (but nobody cares because they don't speak English and don't need international content anyway), and most of the rest of the world is so expensive that hardly anyone uses it anyway. If there's another killer app on the way, there are enough global constraints on its development that I reckon Australian ISPs' business cases probably aren't the be-all and end-all of its developmental merits. Five years ago the typical .au quota was 3Gbytes per month. Now it's more like 30 - 50 Gbytes per month. If there's a killer app there'll no doubt be commercial pressure on ISPs to bump it again. But until said app comes along? Well, it isn't an ISPs job to subsidize the R&D overheads of application developers, is it? The point here is that you guys in the US have a particular market dynamic that's shaped your perspective of what "reasonable" is. It's completely delusional of you to insist that the rest of the world follow the same definition of "reaosnable", *ESPECIALLY* when the rest of the world is subsidizing your domestic Internet by paying for all the international transit. - mark -- Mark Newton Email: newton@internode.com.au (W) Network Engineer Email: newton@atdot.dotat.org (H) Internode Systems Pty Ltd Desk: +61-8-82282999 "Network Man" - Anagram of "Mark Newton" Mobile: +61-416-202-223