al_bundling

Isentropic PHES Technology Explained https://youtube.com/watch?v=sIxt6nMf-IQ

> 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.

> Is pumped hydro really 30% more inefficient than even that figure?

The article states 30% cheaper, not 30% more efficient.

> If it's $103/GWh, on the other hand, then we're talking about only ~10% overhead on costs.

The article states $103/kWh, not per GWh. To calculate overhead costs you would need to know life cycle costs which were not disclosed.

It's not so bad. Less than pumped hydro and conventional batteries and at grid scale. Combined those are big pluses as pumped hybro can't be built anywhere and batteries are not suitable for grid scale.

The question is, what are the life cycle costs? If it's on par with pumped hydro, then we are talking.

According to their website it looks quite early stage/small scale/experimental. Anybody know how far from feasible and commercial scale they are?

In the case of the OP, even they are at least 5 to 6 years out according to the founders.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Not everybody wants to be an ISP. Not enough profit in it to make it worth it for the manager. Lack of backhaul and/or cost/difficulty of connecting to backhaul. Existing long term contracts of tennants. High turnover of tennants. Lack of scale.

> 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.

Like that's going to make a difference or not. Comcast is going to charge you for Netflix bandwidth regardless of it coming from a local cache or not.

> I wish they would just meter the peak hours -- this way more people would set their backups to run overnight

There are a few problems with this. Firstly, very few users are going to cut down peak usage, because it's during primetime that they have the free time and inclination to use the Internet.

Secondly most people don't even know what a GB is. Thirdly, you assume usage-based fees are meant to curb usage rather than drive profits.

> or services would offer a way to cache episodes locally during the night so you can watch them after work.

Since we are basically talking Netflix here, this is never going to fly with the DRM guys.

This is not a technical problem, as you can see, since the desided outcome can be reached, if you are willing to ignore some legal niceties...

It's not like there's much they can do as they aren't Comcast's customers.

> What is the additional cost to Comcast of the connection being used at, say 95% of capacity instead of 50%?

The marginal cost to Comcast is close to zero, the question is how to account for upgrades if everybodys usage goes up enough to exceed network design capacity.

Regular folk unexpectedly think that the cost of normal network upgrades are included in this so called "monthly subscription fee", but Comcast has real accountants with actual hard copy degrees on their walls that tell us that we need additional "bandwidth usage fees" and "overage fees" to pay for it in the US.

>I've asked this out in the open before and always got blank stares and crazy looks, but how hard/expensive would it be to start your own neighborhood ISP and peer directly with a backbone?

The technical parts are fairly straightforward, what gets hard/expensive is the legal, permiting, construction part.

> What's the up-front investment required and how many users at what price point would be needed to make it reasonable or profitable?

As the old adage goes, if you have to ask then you can't afford it...

> I guess the main problem is still transport to the premises...

Exactly. Rule of thumb is that 90% of network costs are in the last mile and most of those costs are in the last few yards.

Equipment, cables and materials still cost the same, so the comparison is relevant. Even adjusting for PPP, the difference is striking. And to explain the differences, you have to look at external factors, such as competition and regulation.

> Part of the problem is adding capacity in an HFC network is expensive and difficult

Sure, but no more than doing VDSL, which is basically the same thing for ADSL as splitting nodes in a HFC network. A FTTC+VDSL upgrade is about $400 per subscriber which is $17 per month on a typical 24 month contract. That's quite doable and typical network life cycles are much longer, which brings the cost further down.

I'm sure there's going to be a fair bit of complaining as time goes by and normal usage grows but caps stay the same.

My bad, I misread your point, but in hindsight it's quite obvious what you meant from the context. Wording was a bit ambiguous tho.

> Why in the US is ADSL not more prevalent?

Long line lenghts (average loop lenght 3.3km, resulting in sub-10Mbps speeds), no competition due to line sharing regulation being struck down.

That's too bad. You could check out the Google spreadsheet at Whirlpool with all Australian mobile plans to see if you can find a better Telstra plan or one from another provider that uses Telstra's network.

http://forums.whirlpool.net.au/forum-replies.cfm?t=1572741

> My personal conclusion (as much as people shout at me otherwise) is that geek communities quietly realize they are top-1% users and their usage patterns are subsidized by everybody else

You are conflating two very separate issues and the statement is false. Being a top-1% user by volume does not mean that you are subsidized by everybody else.

Network costs are diven by peak usage, i.e. when there is a risk of congestion. Peak usage is during primetime and the majority of users are online then. Thus almost everybody uses the network at the same time and it makes sense to share the cost equally. Hence nobody is subsidizing anybody else.

Here's the data to back me up:

"In order to investigate these issues, we took real user data for all the broadband customers connected to a single aggregation link and analyzed the network statistics on data consumption in five-minute time increments over a whole day.The data was shared by an ISP in North America who wanted to understand its own network usage. Our analysis tracked both data consumption (i.e. total MB downloaded) and bandwidth usage (i.e. Mbps being used).

...

42% of all customers (and nearly 48% of active customers) are amongst the top 10% of bandwidth users at onepoint or another during peak hours."

Source: diffeaction Analysis http://www.fiberevolution.com/2011/11/do-data-caps-punish-th...

> The 3G is surprisingly fast (6 MBps), but it's $60 for 4 GB

Switch to Optus prepaid. It's $2 per day for 0.5 GB per day. $2 more for 0.5 GB if you run out of you daily 0.5 GB.

> So why would you make it more expensive for people to use their personal pipe, which just stands there anyway?

It's not your personal pipe. The bandwidth on the segment connected to you is shared with your neighbours. Upgrading the bandwidth on your segment costs money, ergo we do not want you to use "too much" bandwidth. Pre-emptively curbing bandwidth usage with threats of and/or actual overage fees, ensures higher operating margins and puts off upgrade expenses, thus increasing profits.

Not perhaps the answer you were hoping for, but hey, corporations gotta make money, right?

> 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

> So your 100 meg line has a "cost" of $100 for shit-tier transit

Wholesale rates from quality providers are about $0.30 per Mbps per month at 95th percentile. For paid transit, that is, and Comcast does a lot of peering which brings the cost down for them.

So that's $30 per month for your 100M line, even if you run it full tilt all month and manage to hit only paid transit routes all the time. That's not too bad and most people use only a small fraction of their theoretical monthly throughput.

> There's always a vitriolic reaction in geek communities to usage-based billing

The vitrol is aimed at unreasonably high fees. Quite justifiably, I might add.

> Can anyone explain to me what the marginal costs are for additional traffic, within Comcast's network?

Marginal costs within the design capacity of the network are close to zero. If the traffic happens to be external, to a network Comcast pays transit to (if such exist) and it's in a direction that's billable (transit is paid in the direction that is larger) then the wholesale rate (for that fraction of the traffic) would be billed at about 0.1 cents per GB.