Hacker News Reader

Comment by gojomo | Hacker News Reader

That's about the same price per GB as Amazon AWS originally launched with, and they had the choice, scale, and concentration of data centers. So this doesn't seem totally-out-of-whack for consumer retail, to me.

And if there are other paths to get the bits there cheaper – wireless (including mesh, free space optical, or new bandwidths) or new wires – these prices motivate the new entrants who can do it.

Comcast maximizing their profits is not the last step, but one move in an iterated, endless game. Comcast's move – if people choose to pay and Comcast makes money – incents the next round of competition.

View on HN

Traffic is to AWS as ink is to customer-level printers or blades are to razors. Suffice it to say that these prices are extremely out-of-of-whack for both AWS and Comcast, particularly because you don't get guaranteed bandwidth for it.

"Choose to" is a very interesting choice of words seeing how the vast majority of their market is that they are they only option and people have no choice.

Most places in the US have at least two wired options, and two or more wireless options. And, if Comcast charges too much, and cities allow it (as with Google Fiber), other options will arrive.

I call BS. I live in a suburb of San Francisco and have a choice between Comcast and 5Mbps DSL. In other words, I have no choice whatsoever because my telecommuting (and Netflix and Hulu and...) need higher speed bursts than that.

And these are still better options than my family in the Midwest and New York have available to them. You just can't claim with a straight face that there's competition in this market.

> better options than my family in the Midwest

Minneapolis is a beacon of hope, here. $40 for 100 Mbps / 100 Mbps in much of the city, from a local fiber provider.

That's what kills me. Comcast's audacity is just so much more galling when you've actually experienced what happens with competition. And not that competition is a panacea, necessarily. I don't have a say in my water, gas, or electricity providers, but in exchange for that monopoly, they're subject to pretty serious regulation.

Indeed, let's make everyplace like Minneapolis, or Google Fiber cities, by fixing each local market with new options.

That's much better than nationally locking-in a pipes-and-sewers-like regulatory structure that freezes incumbents into a safe but slow-moving regulated approach, for decades.

The decades of Title-II-regulated AT&T telecom monopoly were not good for consumers or innovation. They were safe and slow.

You have two wired options, which is exactly what I said. (You can't call 'BS' if your facts are consistent with my claims!)

I have 5Mbps DSL in San Francisco. It's plenty for HD Netflix and Hulu, VOIP, and video-calling.

I suspect you also have 3+ wireless options, some of which likely offer 20Mbps+ in bursts. Yes, it costs more. Yes, you'd like to pay less. Everyone would! But your desire for more modern luxury goods (massive HD bandwidth), cheaper, is not a public policy crisis.

Someone has to invest more to give you more, and market-floating prices for the existing paths are exactly what draws in more investment – or sends you a signal that you should 'self-help' to the nearest source of plentiful bandwidth.

The road my Dad lives on has no cable lines because it would apparently be unprofitable for Comcast to run them. This was told to me by a manager I somehow was able to get on the phone more than 10 years ago, and it is still that way out there. Comcast has an exclusive monopoly to service that road but choose not to. All roads connected to it have Comcast lines and the nearest line is less than a half mile away. He is too far away for DSL and other such options. His only choices are Dial-up and unreliable satellite (trees around yard).

I understand he is an exception, but it is not nearly as uncommon as you are implying.

Over 93% of the population has wired broadband access – over 99% if wireless options are considered:

http://www.broadbandmap.gov/blog/

So yes, your father's property is an unfortunate outlier. His main beef should be with the local authorities who granted Comcast a monopoly without a prompt requirement-to-service.

(And in places where Comcast is truly the only provider, local regulation until other options arrive makes sense. Just not nationally, when almost everywhere has 2+ wired options and 3+ wireless options, and could also incrementally add new wires and towers far more easily than outlying/non-urban places.)

Exclusive cable monopolies have been illegal for over 20 years.

You understand they launched in 2006 and subsides their hardware costs with extremely high bandwidth costs and that was the highest possible price they charged right?

PS: And a little idea that might blow your mind, Comcast effectively pays nothing for bandwidth to the internet. Like SMS it's so cheap they would have trouble actually finding out how much it costs them and would need to add up the cost of patch cables in the data-center as a significant 'cost'.

You neglect one side of the equation, the amortized cost of the network expansion required to accommodate delivery of that data to the consumer - AWS has no such issues, the cost of OSP is tremendous compared to a datacenter - and thats just to install it, nevermind the OPEX to run it, fix it, maintain it.

Of course. But also, such data-center hosting is essentially "wholesale", for customers who are indifferent about location and buying enough to care about slight changes in rates.

Retail, to a particular fixed location, and for households where bandwidth is a tiny part of their overall budget, is naturally going to be 2-10X more expensive.

AWS wholesale transfer out (not subsidized/forgiven to make their service 'sticky') is still $0.12/GB. Comcast's retail price is less than 2X that. No biggie.

Your using AWS's highest prices. AWS also lists is $0.05 per GB to the internet and it get's cheaper if your a large scale customer. Comcast on on the other hand charges an "additional $1.00 for each gigabyte of data used over the 5 GB included in the Flexible-Data Option."

To be fair, in order to get that $0.05/GB rate, you have to be spending more than $11,000/mo on data transfer.

I don't see AWS's $0.05/GB. I see $0.12/GB outbound, for the first 10TB. Google has the same per-GB pricing.

But again, that's bulk wholesale which is often 2-10X cheaper in any industry. Compare like to like.

It's standard tiered pricing. They have a free tier which is subsidized by their next tier @12c per GB but most mid sized clients get into 5c or less scale.

  First 1 GB / month	$0.000 per GB
  Up to 10 TB / month	$0.120 per GB
  Next 40 TB / month	$0.090 per GB
  Next 100 TB / month	$0.070 per GB
  Next 350 TB / month	$0.050 per GB

Above that call them it you can work out even lower prices.

That would be relevant if an important fraction of households used > 10TB. Comcast has reported only ~2% use more than 300GB. So $0.12/GB from centralized, wholesale AWS/Google is the most relevant comparison to Comcast's $0.20/GB retail.

Even accepting that which is a stretch. Your comparing the absolute worst from AWS to Comcast lowest prices. Don't forget unlike AWS Comcast charges for both upload and download and charges the full 10$ for the first bit. Making there actual costs at best 40c per downloaded GB, but more realistically there charging 10$ for people who are going to average 1/2 that bucket split 50/50 upload and down that's 80c /GB on average. And hundreds of thousands of dollars per GB in the worst case Aka 300.001 GB.

Any way you slice it AWS charges rediculusly high bandwidth costs and Comcast still charges way more than that.

I think you don't realize that nobody buys GB of traffic wholesale. They buy bandwidth.

You are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. Nobody buys GB of traffic wholesale, they buy TB of traffic because a GB is literally a rounding error.

What you probably meant to say was that wholesale bandwith is usually puchased by the Mbps on a 95th percentile billing, although you can alternatively buy by the TB from some providers.

AWS & Google Cloud customers obviously buy by the GB.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com