Comment by LukaAl | Hacker News Reader

Comment by LukaAl | Hacker News Reader

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Hold on a second. Your reasoning has some issues:

1) The peering happens in Internet exchanges, there's no way a peering connection in an Internet Exchange costs 1000$, your range is simply ridiculous. Usually, it is fixed cost 1K or less depending on the locations of the router

2) Yes, you have to pay for bandwidth between the Exchange and your users. But guess what? That's what your users are paying for.

3) Not everyone stream movie in 4K at the same time. So you could optimize your bandwidth usage out of the exchanges. It is called "multiplexing".

Yes, the rest of the chain could be expensive, but that's what your clients are paying for. Net neutrality is about transparency. I have no problem in understanding that my 40$ connection will perform differently than an 80$ one. But you should compete in giving me the best service (where best is best for me, not universally) at the lowest price point in a way I could easily compare prices.

The problem, with my statement, is that implies Broadband Internet is a commoditized service. And that is all the battle about Net Neutrality, ISP doesn't want to act like commodities, they don't want to be your P&G or your ConEd. They don't have the structure to compete and instead of changing for the new market structure, they are fighting back. What they are doing is rent seeking. Good for them, bad for the economy...

I acknowledge that the costs are ballpark and not exact, but I was responding to a post that called the costs "negligible" - I was simply trying to quantify a slice of the cost and demonstrate that it can be a significant fraction of your bill. Of course your bill ALSO pays for the last mile infrastructure and connectivity to the hundreds of thousands of other routes carried on the internet. But it's clarifying to see that the data interchange component, which people are calling "negligible" actually is a significant portion of the cost.

My numbers have been called ridiculous by a couple of people now but they are based in personal experience, albeit a few years old, and nobody has posted any other cost breakdowns that demonstrate an understanding of the industry and the costs involved, just "those numbers seem really high!"

The difference between bandwidth and power is that data is NOT a commodity like power is, power is fungible and can be drawn and combined from a number of sources to fulfill the demand, but the dilemma with ISP bandwidth is that in order to satisfy customers the ISP must ensure adequate bandwidth to each individual content provider, and this is a much harder problem.

The problem is your numbers are terribly wrong in multiple ways. I don't think people have mentioned that not every subscriber is online simultaneously or that most are still watching 1080p.

Your argument is at least as wrong as mine, though, while you seek to reduce the numbers, you are not also seeking to increase the scope of the cost from JUST the hardware depreciation and monthly fiber cost of the interconnect to the actual cost of the interconnect. The point is, it's not even close to "negligible"

Not to mention if you're saturating a 10gbps connection, Netflix will throw as many OpenConnect appliances at you as you'd like. Yes, they're not "free" when you factor in racking, etc, but local bandwidth is cheaper than peering, even factoring in your valid comments here.

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