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Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?

  • From: Joe Abley
  • Date: Sun Jan 07 15:10:35 2007



On 7-Jan-2007, at 15:17, Brandon Butterworth wrote:

The only time that costs increase is when I download
data from outside of BT's network because the increased
traffic reaquires larger circuits or more circuits, etc.

Incorrect, DSLAM backhaul costs regardless of where the traffic comes from. ISPs pay for that, it costs more than transit

Setting aside the issue of what particular ISPs today have to pay, the real cost of sending data, best-effort over an existing network which has spare capacity and which is already supported and managed is surely zero.


If I acquire content while I'm sleeping, during a low dip in my ISP's usage profile, the chances good that are nobody incurs more costs that month than if I had decided not to acquire it. (For example, you might imagine an RSS feed with BitTorrent enclosures, which requires no human presence to trigger the downloads.)

If I acquire content the same time as many other people, since what I'm watching is some coordinated, streaming event, then it seems far more likely that the popularity of the content will lead to network congestion, or push up a peak on an interface somewhere which will lead to a requirement for a circuit upgrade, or affect a 95%ile transit cost, or something.

If asynchronous delivery of content is as free as I think it is, and synchronous delivery of content is as expensive as I suspect it might be, it follows that there ought to be more of the former than the latter going on.

If it turned out that there was several orders of magnitude more content being shifted around the Internet in a "download when you are able; watch later" fashion than there is content being streamed to viewers in real-time I would be thoroughly unsurprised.


Joe