Bandwidth Costs

Posted Apr 5, 2006 18:43 UTC (Wed) by smoogen (subscriber, #97)
Parent article: The end of the Fedora Foundation

I worked at Red Hat for several years and so my comments can be dismissed as more propaganda.. but I can say that the bandwidth costs are accurate. When I was running the FTP mirrors in 2000->2001, the costs were over 500,000 a year for our mirror sites. The amount of bandwidth has gone up and the costs are no longer being 'given' away prices.

Bandwidth was the largest cost of the mirror servers. The 6 servers and their Netapp backend was a pittance in how much it cost for bandwidth.. and we were given deep discounts during the dotcom hype to get Red Hat's name on XYZ's colo name. Bandwidth is the hidden cost of the Internet commons.

The reason I am commenting on this, is that I have had multiple conversations where people do the math that if they put together 100 home DSL's they would supposedly have the same bandwidth as some colo and not pay as much as the business says it puts into costs. Most people dont realize that most home users get loss-leader pricing that is supplemented by higher costs to businesses... Universities also get a discount but that has been going away in some spots. [At least a couple US midwest university IT people have told me that they are looking at charging bandwidth costs per dorm room to cover the rising costs they are getting.]

Bandwidth Costs

Posted Apr 6, 2006 0:39 UTC (Thu) by beoba (guest, #16942) [Link] (1 responses)

Bittorrent.

Bandwidth Costs

Posted Apr 6, 2006 15:11 UTC (Thu) by pjones (subscriber, #31722) [Link]

Fedora is released on bittorrent at the same time it's released on ftp. Details are at http://torrent.fedoraproject.net/ . One minor difference between the torrent and ftp is that many people involved in the release seed the torrent ahead of time, so there is a reasonable cloud when we announce it.

Since the release on the 20th, the the various FC5 torrents have had roughly 55000 downloads, totalling nearly 165 terrabytes of data transferred.

Believe me, we know about bittorrent.

Bandwidth Costs

Posted Apr 6, 2006 1:49 UTC (Thu) by butlerm (subscriber, #13312) [Link] (1 responses)

Internet bandwidth (properly measured) is not sold at a loss to home users. A typical home user with a 1 Mbit/sec connection consumes only a small fraction of that on average, even during peak hours. A typical ISP makes a pretty healthy margin on bandwidth when measured in terms of net cost per GB transferred, a margin that increases with economies of scale.

Bandwidth Costs

Posted Apr 6, 2006 23:54 UTC (Thu) by smoogen (subscriber, #97) [Link]

It is sold at a loss if the total bandwidth was used for the entire month. It is the fact that most people do not that makes it profitable. Areas where more people max out the bandwidth there are losses. At the 200 kbit/s range the local ISPs I have consulted with see a loss with P2P and online movies. [The ISPs arent going to see 1mbit/s or 8mbit/s for a while since we are in the rural badlands of Qwest.]