On Sat, 13 Jan 2007, Sean Donelan wrote:
What happens if a 100Mbps port is $19.95/month with $1.95 per GB transferred up and down? Are P2P swarms as attractive?
$1.95 is outrageously expensive. Let's say we want to pass on our costs to the users with the highest usage: 1 megabit/s for a month is: 1/8*60*60*24*30=324000M=324 gigabytes Let's say this 1 megabit/s costs us $20 (which is fairly high in most markets), that means the price of a gigabyte transferred should be $0.06, let's say we increase that (because of peak usage, administrative costs etc) to $0.2. Now, let's include 35 gigs of traffic in each users alottment to get rid of usage based billing for most users (100 kilobit/s average usage) and add that to your above 100 meg port, and we end up with around $28, let's make that $29.95 a month including the 35 gigs. Hey, make it 50 gigs for good measure. Now, my guess is that 90% of the users will never use more than 50 gigs, and if they do, their increased usage will be quite marginal, but if someone actually uses 5 megabit/s on average (1.6terabytes per month (not unheard of) that person will have to fork out some money ($300 extra per month). Oh, this model would also require that you pay for bw you PRODUCE, not what you receive (since you cannot control that (DDoS, scanning etc)). So basically anyone sourcing material to the internet would have to pay in some way, the ones receiving wouldn't have to pay so much (only their monthly fee). The bad part is that this model would most likely hinder a lot of content-producers from actually publishing their content, but on the other hand it might be a better deal to distribute content more closer to the customers as carriers might be inclined to let you put servers in their network that only can send traffic to their network, not anybody else. It might also preclude a model where carriers charge each other on the amount of incoming traffic they see from peers. Personally, I don't think I want to see this but it does make sense in a economical/technical way, somewhat like road tolls. -- Mikael Abrahamsson email: swmike@swm.pp.se