Comment by onemoreact | Hacker News Reader

Comment by onemoreact | Hacker News Reader

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Local Monopolies have little incentive to improve their infrastructure. When you enable them to charge premiums for degrading existing service to carve out 'bandwidth' for premium service everyone looses so they can make a higher profit from the same crappy service.

Bandwidth is cheap. The bandwidth to give everyone in a mid sized city 100mb internet access costs around 20$/person a month + the cost of the wires. So, if Comcast provides 5mb internet for X$ they can make money providing 100mb for X + 20$. Yet, they want to both charge 3+ times that AND make money on side deals AND keep their local monopoly.

Now, latency is a slightly different issue. I would suggest that it's reasonable to either run an extra line OR host some servers locally to deal with that. But, assuming you have a sane network topology there are vary few cases where latency is actually important. Yet, if Comcast sees an opportunity to profit from the latency game they will do so. They already provide crappy DNS service to slow people down just think what they will do if they think latency is the path to extra profit.

PS: You could replace Comcast with Cox and probably just about any other local cable company and say the same things. But, I just happen to know more about Comcast and they are in the article so I stick with them.

Where are you getting the $20 number from?

I do not want to be in the position of defending Comcast (who I hate with fiery passion), but that sounds a bit like arguing that the cost of manufacturing an Adobe Photoshop disc is relevant to how much it can or should cost.

Talking with friends in the that work at backbone companies. One of the funny stories I remember is the sales people having issues making sure that they actually charged more money for higher bandwidth connections due to some internal issues they almost set the prices for OC-12 lines (622 megabits) below that of OC-3 lines (155 megabits). As I understand it internally OC-3 lines where costing them slightly them more to deploy at the time.

Now, latency is a slightly different issue. I would suggest that it's reasonable to either run an extra line OR host some servers locally to deal with that.

How does running an extra line lower your latency? I think you're confusing bandwidth and latency here. Latency would involve replacing your line with better infrastructure (small impact) or changing the route your packets would tend to take to one with fewer hops and shorter distances (big impact).

If your latency is generally a combination of # of routers, physical path, and network congestion between you and the destination. Locally number of hops dominates the latency. So if the old path is comcast > Level 3 > google then running a comcast > google line will lower your latency by removing Level 3's routers and probably proving a shorter path.

Bandwidth isn't literally width like a pipe of water. It is linespeed. That is why higher quality cables have higher bandwidth, even though packet transmission is completely serial. "wdth" is an illusion created by time division multiplexing, like multitasking/multithreading on a PC.

This isn't always true because time isn't the only multiplexing strategy used. For instance, modern cable modems use code-division multiplexing, and fiber optic communications typically uses a variant of wavelength-division multiplexing. In both of the later cases, there is actually simultaneous transmission.

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