Why is it that the US has ISP’s with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP’s with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
Yeah, try buying bandwidth in Australia! The have a lot more water to
cover ( and so potentially more cost and more profit to be made by
monopolies) than well connected areas such as the US.
Also there may be more tax costs, staff costs, equipment costs with
import duty etc which obviously means buying more equipment to support
more throughput costs more money.
Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
There are more than a few US ISPs that have bandwidth quotas, mostly in the last-mile fixed-wireless space.
I imagine the cost of backhauling traffic a few thousand miles in underseas cables would add to the cost of running an ISP in, say, Australia, especially since many sites the end-users will want to see are still hosted in the US.
David Smith
MVN.net
The biggest issues are the transmission costs to get to the USA.
There are basically two cable systems, Southern Cross and AJC
(we'll ignore SEA-ME-WE-3 because you can only buy STM-1's on it,
and who wants to mess around with trivialities like that?)
Ask an economist what happens to prices in duopoly environments.
The cost of crossing the Pacific is north of US$200 per megabit
per month in .au, which I reckon is about ten times what it costs
you Europeans to get across the Atlantic (or what it costs the
Japanese to cross the very same Pacific)
There are a few cable projects underway at the moment which
may break the duopoly, e.g.,
http://www.pipenetworks.com/docs/media/ASX_07_08_09%20Runway%20Update%204%20-%20BSa.pdf
I suspect we're going to have an interesting few years.
- mark
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
The combination of an English language society, its distance from content of interest to those speaking said language and countries sheer lack of population density outside of a few towns (sorry cities ;-).
Caribbean has the same problem, though... .smaller countries, less ability to negotiate bandwidth usage/cost...
bananas for bandwidth program.
Leigh Porter wrote:
Depending upon the country you're in, that is a possibility. Some countries have either state-run or monopolistic telcos, so there is little or no competition to force prices down over time.
Even in the US, there is a huge variability in the price of telco services from one part of the country to another.
jms
Hint: whenever/wherever service providers are able to secure the majority of their essential inputs on a predictable fixed cost basis (e.g., circuits rather than variable IP transit), they tend to extend the same pricing model to their customers. However, in some cases there is a major lag separating the timing of the change in the provider-level cost model and the change in customer-facing pricing. Absent competition, the lag may be infinite. In other cases, there may be more variable costs associated with service delivery than is immediately obvious.
Southern Cross was completed in late 2000, and not long after (couple of years) incumbent operators in AUNZ had done a pretty good job of leveraging the new infrastructure to effect just the sort of variable-to-fixed cost conversion described above. Marginal improvements in customer pricing are just starting to happen in the last year or so...
TV
In Europe, the only ISPs where i've seen bandwith quotas was some
cables operators, while in Canada bandwith quotas seem to be still in
place at many ISPs.
I'm not an expert at all, but it seems that in Europe, even far from
the US-hosted websites, the bandwith cost may be cheaper.
I don't necessarily think it is only that.
Customers on ADSL2+ usually get the maximum ADSL2+ speed
their line will support, so customers can have speeds of up to 24Mbps
downstream. Download and/or upload quotas have an effect
of smoothing out the backhaul impact those high bandwidth customers
could make. As they could use up all their quota in such a short time
period at those speeds, and once they exceed their quota they'd get
their speed shaped down to something like 64Kbps, it typically forces
the customer to make their bandwidth usage patterns more bursty rather
than a constant. That effect, averaged across a "backhaul region" helps
avoid having to provision backhaul bandwidth for a much higher constant
load.
Regards,
Mark.
One early US cable modem company started propagating the "Don't Let
Customers Run Anything Resembling a Server" meme to many other ISPs,
primarily cable but also DSL.
One early Australian cable company started propagating the "Don't Let
Customers Download More than X MB/month" meme, and while it hasn't
been picked up as widely, there are a number of ISPs that have adopted
it.
At one time Australia did have a relatively small amount of Internet
bandwidth and a large non-data-clueful dominant carrier, which had
only gradually been bullied into accepting that there were data
customers who wanted an E1 line because they wanted the whole 2Mbps
for one medium-sized data channel as opposed to 30 channels of
boringly slow 64kbps (perceived by the carrier to be blazingly
fast...) So they charged their users a lot to download data from
outside; I forget if they were the ones who had a cheaper rate for
data downloaded from inside Australia or not.
But outside the Land of Oz, it used to be that European PTTs also
charged excessive amounts of money for connections around their
countries or across borders. That's changed radically with
liberalization. And of course Japan and Korea charge minimal amounts
for huge home broadband bandwidth - Korea has about triple the
population of Australia, in much smaller land area, and while it's not
quite as far from Silicon Valley as Australia is, and of course it's
much closer to Tokyo, it's still got to cost a bit to run the cables
there.
Hex Star wrote:
Why is it that the US has ISP's with either no quotas or obscenely high
ones while countries like Australia have ISP's with ~12gb quotas? Is
there some kind of added cost running a non US ISP?
In the UK there is a very good reason - BT, see this write up:
J
In article <31566c420710041452h30303dd1v6e11e67aa4b23a03@mail.gmail.com>, Vassili Tchersky <vt@phear.org> writes
In Europe, the only ISPs where i've seen bandwith quotas was some
cables operators
Almost all ADSL operators in the UK operate bandwidth quotas.
eg: Currently my ISP is selling 50/20/5/0.5 GB a month options.
There are many reasons, the most powerful being price competition - the cheapest domestic ADSL is $18 a month (inc tax), ranging up to $50 a month for the highest quotas.
ISPs offering 200Mb plans on ADSL2+ here in Australia, then charging HUGE
amounts for excess - usually with no notification (at around the $12AU/Gb
rate) may well find themselves in an interesting legal position. Under
Australian law, the 'Bait and Switch' protection is very strict.
With things such as Windows Updates, Virus definition updates, anti-spyware
updates, etc etc etc on a monthly basis, this would easily eat up the 200Mb
allowed by the ISP - leaving ANY usage by the users to be billed at a very
expensive rate.
I've thought for a while that it's only a matter of time before someone sues
an ISP under the 'bait and switch' rules arguing that the ISP knew of these
facts and charged them a premium rate for all their normal surfing - or
offer to switch them to a more expensive, higher quota plan.
Out of interest, has anyone heard of this happening elsewhere on the planet?
In this bit of Europe (UK), it's the opposite: the cable companies (CLEC style companies) tend to run unlimited (but within fair use) aggregate throughput policies, but the DSL operating companies have to impose aggregate throughput caps because the last mile connectivity is run by the national incumbent.
Bandwidth here is cheap on the face of it (ethernet presented ip transit is a bargain, exchange connections are not expensive, peering happens widely too), but because the last mile hurts, this affects consumer pricing.
I wonder if this is the case in the OP's country.
Andy
In article <65906A49-7E4E-4B8A-AC49-9342B09B7152@nosignal.org>, Andy Davidson <andy@nosignal.org> writes
In this bit of Europe (UK), it's the opposite: the cable companies (CLEC style companies) tend to run unlimited (but within fair use) aggregate throughput policies, but the DSL operating companies have to impose aggregate throughput caps because the last mile connectivity is run by the national incumbent.
Surely the incumbent doesn't impose a cost on the bandwidth along the local loop - the bottleneck (and cost per gigabyte) is the backhaul from their locally operated DSLAM to the ISP's own network.
Yes, and it's £1,758,693 ($3.5m) PA for a 622Mbit BT Central, (so in bandwidth terms, equates to $471/Mbit per month - if the central is maxxed out).
(Using $2=£1)
If you're buying wholesale from the incumbent, it's effectively the same
thing, as there's some kind of L2 connection per subscriber back to your
own network, so no possibility to talk to other local subscribers without
the hairpin. (At least, I've yet to see such a thing in the offering from
any European incumbent. I guess you could in theory with a virtual-router
or VRF per ISP on the incumbent's kit at the exchange, but that brings
other problems when you want to do things beyond basic Internet, e.g. VPN
or pseudowire services.)
Unbundling does change the model - renting just the metal path from BT is
not actually *that* horrific - but you then have to factor in your own kit
in the exchange. That's not just cost, there's a big logistics piece -
and a lot of processes to change if you've built your business around
wholesale.
Regards,
Tim.
In article <312BF2DA-8482-4312-9ACF-6A8DD4621862@nosignal.org>,
Surely the incumbent doesn't impose a cost on the bandwidth along
the local loop - the bottleneck (and cost per gigabyte) is the
backhaul from their locally operated DSLAM to the ISP's own network.Yes, and it's 1,758,693 ($3.5m) PA for a 622Mbit BT Central, (so in
bandwidth terms, equates to $471/Mbit per month - if the central is
maxxed out).
Wow. The pricing of the local incumbent in .NL is public - you
can find everything on www.kpn-wholesale.com. Here is a direct
link to the pdf with wholesale-prices:
http://www.kpn-wholesale.com/content/doc/WBA%20annex%204%20CM%20v1.3.pdf
I guess it's about 50-100 times cheaper, but OTOH, we only put
like ~3000 customers on an STM-4, so we need way more of them.
Mike.