If Comcast charged the same rates as AWS, I probably wouldn't mind. But Comcast charges ~1000x more per GB.

In addition, with AWS I can always switch to a cheaper provider. I can not switch to a cheaper cable company.

1000X more? Not by the source article: 50GB/$10 is $0.20/GB which is less than 2X AWS/Google's wholesale $0.12/GB.

And that only kicks in after the first 300GB.

> 1000X more? Not by the source article: 50GB/$10 is $0.20/GB which is less than 2X AWS/Google's wholesale $0.12/GB.

AWS/Google retail bandwidth prices are a bad comparison, as they are ridiculously expensive compared to wholesale bandwidth prices.

Wholesale bandwidth costs about 0.1 cents per GB. Not quite 1000X what Comcast charges, it's "only" 100X the wholesale rate.

To give you some perspective, Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net said they spend about 3% of their costs on bandwidth. Please consider that Sonic is a small actor and at scale costs will be less.

> Wholesale bandwidth costs about 0.1 cents per GB.

Source? I've often wondered what this number is when viewed in aggregate across carriers - I can just never find it.

> Source?

http://amazon.com/ip-transit

Just kidding. Seriously though, you are not going to see wholesale rates posted on a website. Contact your bandwidth provider and ask for a quote. For serious volumes and good pricing, expect to sign an NDA.

However, to give you an idea of lowend pricing here are some examples from FDCservers. This is not an endorsement, just a site with easily accessible prices that I could remember off the top of my head. In fact, I emphatically do not recommend them. There are much better providers both in terms of price and quality.

Remember 0.1 cents per GB equals about $0.30 per Mbps.

Asymmetrical 100G at $0.15 per Mbps https://fdcservers.net/ip-transit.php

Metered 10G at $0.60 per Mbps https://fdcservers.net/colocation.php

Unmetered 10G including server $500 https://fdcservers.net/dedicated-servers.php

$0.003/GB is what $1/1Mbps is, at 100% utilization. 324GB is what 1Mbps can do in a month. Perhaps a bit less but low quality providers (HE, Cogent) will do a dollar a Mbps easily. So work backwards. (Another way, you need 3kbps to do 1GB in a month. That times 333 is about 1Mbps, so $1. I'm ignoring 95th percentile billing here.)

Better providers like L3 are around $3/Mbps, last I heard.

So $0.001 a GB means you'd only pay 33 cents per Mbps, which seems pretty low. But maybe at terabit commits, HE goes even lower.. I've only looked at 10G commits.

Where can you get wholesale bandwidth at $0.001/GB?

You can get a dedicated gigabit line for like a grand a month - possibly less - which if you max out 24/7 gets you like 300 terabytes of bandwidth = $0.00333 - and one gigabit line is hardly wholesale.

www.he.net at $.45/Mbps...1Mbps = 320 GB per month, you can find similar deals out there, it is pretty close.

HE is at the cheap end and I don't think most people are going to colo so they can buy transit, if their colo will even let them.

Not to mention that bringing bandwidth to a DC is way cheaper than bringing it to individual homes.

HE is just an example, the other transit providers will match and beat those prices at wholesale scales. For an ISP the wholesale rate is the same as the DC rate.

We are not talking about individuals buying retail bandwidth here.

The parent comment was talking about comparing Comcast retail prices to AWS retail prices. The story is talking about Xfinity retail plans.

It doesn't make sense to compare retail prices to wholesale prices. If an average coder can't even get bandwidth at $0.001/GB with some serious effort, then how this this a valid point of comparison for how much bandwidth should cost for the average internet user?

I doubt you can get Level3 or Internap to beat HE prices.

> It doesn't make sense to compare retail prices to wholesale prices.

It very much does. It gives you a sense of real world marginal costs, a fair assessment of fair market value (fair retail cost = reasonable markup factor * wholesale cost) and a sense of scale.

> If an average coder can't even get bandwidth at $0.001/GB with some serious effort,

If I can, you can. I've even given examples with links to order pages. Not that I recommend FDCservers, mind you.

> then how this this a valid point of comparison for how much bandwidth should cost for the average internet user?

It's a valid point because it tells you how much bandwidth ACTUALLY costs compared to what Comcast says it costs.

> I doubt you can get Level3 or Internap to beat HE prices.

How much money do you have on you? There's a bet I'd like to win.

I don't think you have any clue what you are talking about. First of all, you are comparing apples to oranges.

Commit to a single DC is not the same thing as metered bandwidth to thousands of customers.

- Running fiber to a DC is way easier than running it house that could be in the middle of nowhere.

- Commit != selling bandwidth by the byte. I think you fail to understand this. I don't have the time to explain this in detail to you anymore as I've already spent more time than I wanted to writing the rest of this.

> If I can, you can. I've even given examples with links to order pages. Not that I recommend FDCservers, mind you.

Uh still wrong, and not even close even if you include FDCservers.

1GBPS $2500/328717GB = $0.007/GB

10GBPS $15000/3287170GB = $0.004/GB

Where's the $0.001/GB?

A page asking you to contact their sales team is not an example. If you are buying transit you need to be in the proper DC and you need to colo. This is out of reach for most programmers that deploy on EC2 or Digital Ocean.

> How much money do you have on you? There's a bet I'd like to win.

You're probably going to make another flawed comparison that you can get tier 1 bandwidth lower than HE by buying some absurd amount of commit. Feel free to prove me wrong with actual quotes.

http://www.webhostingtalk.com/showpost.php?s=8394951450d19c2...

Well, AWS doesn't charge at all for inbound traffic, so you're looking at even worse than 1000x in one direction.

AWS bandwidth costs are grossly overpriced.

Unlimited bandwidth is better for me because I can use the connection without worrying that watching too many videos or downloading too many game updates will cause me to lose the internet access for the rest of the month or get an extremely high bill.

AWS bandwidth usage is not an issue because when the traffic to my websites increases, my ad revenue increases too.

What's the top 1%? Since you're preaching Comcast's virtues in this story, I presume you have the number close at hand?

Comcast has reported ~2% or less of their customers use more than 300GB per month:

http://arstechnica.com/business/2014/05/comcast-plans-data-c...

We are the 98%! And charging the heavy users more makes our service cheaper.

Some of the people complaining here are elites – in technical and economic terms – and want poorer, less-sophisticated people to subsidize their outlier usage. And they're dressing this desire-for-handouts up in a righteous anger!

No. It keeps our price the same and makes Comcast more profitable. Don't think for a second that savings will ever trickle down to us.

This right here is the real lesson. Comcast is not going to lower rates for everyone else because of this.

Actually, that depends on whether Comcast has effective competition. If they do, prices for end-users will improve, trending closer to the cost of servicing them.

If they don't have competition, regulation can't always simulate the same consumer benefits, for a number of reasons. The regulators are often at the mercy of the regulated company. (The FCC, for example, is all telecom/lobbyist/party-functionary lawyers.) The regulated company tends to do fine, as their model and margins get frozen into slow-moving regulatory law. Smaller/newer companies with other models and technologies can't as easily fit into the regulatory mold, which often even bans them from offering the high-value (differentiated) services that could offer a competitive toehold. Can't have some upstart skimming off the cream from the now-tamed monopolist!

Which is why in all cases new competition, not formulaic rules from DC lawyers, should be the policy priority.

I never understood this argument. Comcast doesn't need usage-based pricing to raise rates. They can just raise rates. Their rates change all the time (and vary by where you are). Given that, raising prices for high-usage customers is really kinda the same thing as lowering prices for low-usage customers (give or take a base-rate hike).

I think this argument conflates whether Comcast is too expensive with whether usage-based pricing is necessarily unfair.

Put another way, why is it ok to charge less for a capped speed but it isn't ok to charge less for a capped monthly transfer?

> Comcast doesn't need usage-based pricing to raise rates.

The best kind of rate raises are rate raises that don't look like a rate raise but effectively is one.

> Put another way, why is it ok to charge less for a capped speed but it isn't ok to charge less for a capped monthly transfer?

Because the monthly cap is far too low and the usage fees are ridiculously expensive. Combined with the fine print 95% of customers are worse off with a monthly capped transfer.

> Because the monthly cap is far too low and the usage fees are ridiculously expensive.

So is the complaint that usage fees are inherently wrong, or that Comcast is simply too expensive?

As I said, ridiculously expensive. Nothing inherently wrong with usage fees, as long as they are fair. That being said, usage fees on a consumer broadband product is a really silly idea if charged at less than 10x wholesale rates as we are talking pennies between no usage and 100% usage.

I'm definitely with you that Comcast is too expensive.

I don't agree that the price needs to have any relation to the wholesale cost, though. It's just price discrimination. Expensive shampoo doesn't cost more than cheap shampoo because of the ingredients.

Price discrimination is only ok if it increases consumer surplus and you have a choice of providers. Comcast fails on the former and more often than not on the latter.

I just don't see the difference. Not having a choice in providers is clearly a problem regardless of how that provider structures their fees. Allowing them to charge certain people more and less is not inherently worse.

Allow me to enlighten you:

Price discrimination is ok, if it in addition to providing a premium product also makes the good or product more affordable and available to another class of customers, thus creating a consumer surplus. Classic example: air travel.

Comcast's offering is a sham. It makes broadband more expensive for everyone. This is inherently worse.

I use ~100-150G per month as a -single person-, and I wouldn't consider my usage as nonstandard.

For families the numbers seem sillier.

if it weren't a monopoly, I'd agree

in swaths of the bay area, there is exactly one high speed provider