[gnfargbl]

I make 340Tbit/sec about 1.1x10^11 GiByte/month. GCP premium tier networking is priced at $0.08/GB, so at 80% load that cable would, very naively, have the potential to bring in $7B/month in revenue.

I'm sure they only take in a fraction of that, and their costs are substantial. But even so... cloud bandwidth is overpriced.

[stingraycharles]

You’re thinking about average throughput, while these cables need to be provisioned for max throughput, which can be completely different.

Having said that, cloud bandwidth is indeed overpriced; but at the same time, given that Google Cloud is still burning money, can it perhaps be argued that bandwidth is one of the money makers that allow for other services to be free?

I recall that from the old webhosting days, this was already a common tactic of the providers: lure people in with cheap servers, sometimes even at a loss, and earn money back with bandwidth.

[closedloop129]

Is it good for the economy though?

Resources are used depending on prices. If the costs for providing bandwidth are low and everything else is expensive, but the prices are the other way round, then the economy optimizes to waste resources. That's not sustainable.

[cypress66]

Overpriced is an understatement. It's like 20x as expensive compared to things like colocation.

[dilyevsky]

8c is for transit to outside of their network. For inter-region it’s like 1-15c depending on regions. 1-2c for us/europe which is probably overwhelming majority

[samtho]

With the exception of high-storage/bandwidth websites like video hosting platforms, bandwidth scales linear relative to audience/reach so the high cost is a justifiable expense. We haven’t seen a race to the bottom with bandwidth like we have with storage because the usage of bandwidth implies the product is being used.

Furthermore, software (as a product/service) has the lowest marginal cost of nearly any product. Given the cost it takes to have one more customer on your platform is some nominally small amount of bandwidth (which depending on the product, can be sub 1 gigabyte per month) the additional expense is easily justified.

[klysm]

Yup, but it will continue to be absurdly overpriced because the CapEx is massive and governments are totally okay with oligopoly.

[dilyevsky]

Also 80% utilization seems just ridiculously high to me but maybe at goog volume it’s doable

[jeffbee]

Google regularly runs these at 100%. According to the B4 paper:

"""These features allow many B4 links to run at near 100% utilization and all links to average 70% utilization over long time periods, corresponding to 2-3x efficiency improvements relative to standard practice"""

[fomine3]

How they increase efficiency by using it at 100%? They would stop some lines at night?

[dilyevsky]

Haven’t read the paper yet but guessing just start egressing from random pops on the way when the pipes are full

[throw0101a]

Well, you wouldn't want to hit 80% on Day 1, as you would have no room for growth. Perhaps 50% and after a few years† you'll hit 80% and start planning for a new cable.

† The video said this started five years ago, so there appears to be a lot of lead time that is needed.

[klysm]

I remember seeing a cloudflare post about AWS bandwidth pricing where they estimated something like 20% utilization? I don’t remember where though but I think they can approximate pretty well.