[vacri]

"In the case of DSL, the vast majority of the cost is the cost of maintaining the copper pair to your house, and that cost largely doesn't change, regardless of usage."

Pure nonsense. ISPs have to pay data by volume to upstream providers.

[nikster]

"ISPs have to pay data by volume to upstream providers"

Yes, they do. The question is how much. Chances are it's nowhere near $2.... charging whatever you want is fair game in a free market, but not when you're a monopolist.

[jarek]

Which absolutely does not rule out the possibility that the data cost is much smaller than the cost of maintaining the copper. Do you have the numbers?

[vacri]

I do not at the moment - I perhaps phrased it poorly - but the cost of the in-ground copper wire is but one part of the costs of an ISP - datacenters, call centres, exchanges + dslams, specialist staff, CEO's bonus pay, so on and so forth. To paint the cost of DSL as almost entirely maintenance of the in-ground copper is nonsense.

[Dylan16807]

Well, that's going into the company to provide you with that in-ground wire. It's in the base cost, not affected by how much data you use, which was the main point. Marginal data is cheap.

[vacri]

So you're claiming that the only part of managing throughput is the in-ground wires? That ISPs don't use network admins to manage load congestion? That ISPs don't have to purchase new hardware and other capacity to handle increased bandwidth consumption?

Do you think all ISPs are running off the ancient network equipment they were originally set up with back in the day?

I'm honestly surpised that on /Hacker News/ of all places, so many people thing that the only thing contributing to their bandwidth cost is in-ground copper.

[lsc]

Bandwidth costs money. Nobody says it doesn't. However, the amount of money 5Mbps of bandwidth costs is trivial compared to the cost of maintaining a separate copper pair to your house.

At /my scale/ I can buy bandwidth at around $1 per megabit/sec. 1Mbps is, uh, around 320 gigabytes of data. Even at half utilization that's less than a penny per gigabyte, and any but the smallest of local ISPs are going to dwarf my bandwidth usage. This is the sort of market where cost scales down quite a lot as you scale up, so I would bet quite a lot of money that comcast pays less than I do.

sure, if I wanted to double my usage, I'd have to buy some new network equipment, and spend some network admin time, but generally speaking the cost of your network equipment (at least at my scale) is fairly small compared to the cost of buying the transit in the first place. It certainly doesn't double the cost of bandwidth; and even if it did, bandwidth would still be cheaper than the local loop to your customer's home.

So yeah, uh, your average dsl is what five megabits/sec on a really good day? are you seriously trying to tell me that you can buy a copper loop for less than five bucks a month?

(Actually, I've been in the industry all my life and I've never been involved in buying copper loops; I guess it's possible they are that cheap; If they are, and I find out (oy, the costs of almost everything in this industry are guarded like state secrets. It's such a pain in the ass.) I'll start a DSL ISP. but I'd be very surprised if that were the case. )

[vacri]

Are you seriously trying to tell me that a company with a thousand users requiring 100kb/day versus a company with a thousand users requiring 10GB/day has exactly the same costs apart from just the upstream bandwidth?

That the latter company somehow gets 'cheaper' overalleven though it requires newer network equipment to handle the load?

That the light internet users cause as much support issues as the heavy internet users?

Of course they don't - for the same number of users, heavy internet use increases backend costs. Those 100k users aren't causing congestion with torrents or video, for example. And just like in-ground copper, exchanges, datacentres and the like aren't cheap to install or maintain. Sure they get a bit 'cheaper' with scale, but they're still not 'cheap' - especially if you've got to keep upgrading your equipment to handle load.

Costs in a business rise in things other than directly-related items. Take an example: I've spent the morning doing an emergency repair on an RMA'd item that the service boys don't have the time to do. This has meant that the other critical tasks I've had to do have been pushed back. Sure, you can say that the repair of the RMA'd item is just my wages + spare parts, but you'd be wrong. It's had knock-on costs elsewhere in the system.