Where on earth are you that your still playing $100 a meg for upstream bandwidth?

If you’ll commit to a gig-E port from someone like L3 you can get it for $1500 a month. I’ve even heard about cogent going $1 a gig at similar volumes.

What’s amusing about this entire argument is that wholesale bandwidth thats NOT involving peering is billed by the port of ridiculous size, or 95% usage. Even if Comcast didn’t have its own nationwide fiber network, or Verizon hadn’t bought UUnet and inherited a massive fiber network, they would still be paying well bellow a dollar per meg for transit.

Brett, I noticed your a bandwidth reseller for last mile access, while I do currently know $100 a meg is normal for this, its the cost of the build out to the site that is why this is so high and has almost nothing to do with the actual bandwidth. If your in an on-net location, or already have dark fiber between an exchange and where your are going you can get bandwidth at 1/100th the prices your talking about.

Then again, you said you’ve worked in the industry for a long time and know a lot about this stuff, so I assume I’m not telling you anything you hadn’t already heard right?

At present, they are a cartel conducting an embargo to justify raising prices. They use the misassumption that they are like a traditional utility, so that the ignorant public wastes energy and time arguing over the terms of their own sentences based upon the inappropriate “consumption” yardstick.

The more customers the backbone provider has, the faster it can pay off it’s “mortgage”… or, the less it can charge each customer. Charging less is out of the question, when you have no serious competition. I argue that the telco’s profits (plus the billions they stole from taxpayers in the last decade to expand capacity… but didn’t) have paid for that equipment long ago. At present, they’re trying to keep their vintage switches running as long as they can, because it saves them the expense of upgrading to far faster equipment that likely costs less to operate and maintain. They dont want to invest some of their sweet, sweet clear profits in new equipment which also eliminates their pretense for capping and overcharging their customers! They’d prefer to pack more and more customers onto those smouldering switches *while* maintaining a state of crisis that serves as a smoke screen for charging more. It’s a bandwidth embargo to drive prices up.

The backbone providers (including big ISPs which have their own fiber) have apparently kept abreast of the sweet spot, where they can reap the most profit over the long term, and hold off on upgrading as long as possible. This amount was projected atop their legacy equipment fees, inflating the “cost” of broadband by an order of magnitude! Were they entitled to do this? Certainly, in a fair market -with real competition-. However, by tying their tribute to amounts of data (rather than the volume capacity) which they convey on behalf of their customers, they created the illusion that they are a traditional utility. Presently, they have set a straw man upon the customers, who are now ignorantly arguing over “fair” billing based upon consumption. There simply is no variable consumption. The fixed consumption which remains (power and maintenance), does not justify the current high prices, let alone raising them (which is another way to view capping and overcharging). The profit which these monopolies are reaping, plus the customer’s need for speed, means the equipment can be afforded and should have been upgraded quite a while back.

I see elsewhere you’ve worked for two ISPs. Evidently not in the finance department.

And just to frame the question properly, remember, we’re talking about the abuses of those big ISPs, which unlike your small one, serve both end-customers AND have their own backbones. They don’t have to purchase gigabytes at the cartel rate like you do. Let it not be said that I claimed Mr Glass does not get *billed* for his gigabytes. I have said that gigabytes don’t *cost anything*. The bandwidth fairy may not be giving love to Mr Glass, but it’s almost certain she has stock in Mr Glass’s backbone provider. So we’re not talking about Mr Glass’s position in the Internet ecosystem. We’re talking about those big ISPs who get billed zero (net) for their bandwidth, but not only charge end-customers top dollar for it, they’re eager to openly limit it AND charge more for it as it becomes more “scarce”.

You can see why the ISPs want to move to cell phone like penalty based charging. If they can rely on your lack of information, they can basically offer moderately priced service, but make big bucks on your minor slips and screw ups. The banks make most of their profits this way. Let’s face it, they don’t have the brains to make money by investing it or lending it, or we wouldn’t be bailing them out for billions. One recent scam is transaction reordering in which they process your withdrawals first, then your deposits, even if the latter were performed first. That lets them charge you all sorts of penalties. Another approach is to use balance “holds” to drive you into a negative balance. The back rooms at the big ISPs are probably salivating over this and designing data “blocking” and “pre-allocation” algorithms to drive traffic over the standardized access plan peaks.

I don’t mind paying for what I use. If they want to put me on a byte meter, great, but make sure I have reliable second by second information so I can shape my demand curve. Otherwise, let me buy by the peak time unit as long as I only have to put up with so many brown outs.