[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.