ISP says using the internet is like eating Oreos

[Lurick]

Let's assume I want to start an ISP and I need just gear or I'm an existing ISP and want to replace everything. Let's assume I want to provide everyone with gigabit fiber internet using off the shelf data center class switches. This is a terrible idea to start with for many reasons but let's just play along. List price for 2x fully loaded 8 slot switches with 256x100Gb ports is ~$1 million. Branch that down into 10Gb switches with 40Gb uplinks and you're looking at $15k x 256 = ~$3.9 million. Branch that out once more into 1Gb switches with 4x10Gb uplinks and you need $5k x 3072 = $15.4 million. Total cost to serve ~150,000 people is roughly $20 million. Now assume the proper gear is 5x as much to service those same 150,000 customers and you're looking at around $100 million in equipment costs for brand new equipment with no discount on anything.

 

In the initial analogy I'd need just $138 per person to fund it and in the proper analogy I'd need ~$700 per person or $60/month for 12 months, just to fund all the equipment. Let's assume it costs the same to build out all the infrastructure (people, material, etc) as it does to buy the equipment, you then need to double the time or initial cost to recoup the money. You now need to factor in lets say another $50 million for other stuff over the course of the first year.

 

Now the main problem with that analogy is assuming you're going to give all 150,000 homes pretty much true gigabit fiber per household. If you oversubscribe everything by a 4:1 ratio then you can now serve a nice city of around 600,000 homes for that same cost and recoup all the money in about 8 to 12 months. In reality you have anywhere from a 5:1 to a 10:1 over-subscription ratio meaning you can serve upwards of 5 to 10 million homes with that same cost of about $250 to $350 million for the first year and then probably around $100 to $200 million or so per year thereafter to maintain everything, provide customer support, etc.

 

When it's all said and done, you can pull in around $6 billion in the first year serving around 7.5 million customers and charging $70/month. Of course none of this includes the cost of security infrastructure or backbone management, interconnect cost or anything else but you'll still make a hefty profit even if you need to spend 3 to 5 billion in the first year.

 

 

*Note: There are many flaws in the above but it's just to give a rough napkin style estimate of the cost of new infrastructure, time, etc. and the money they can recoup charging a certain amount. The total profit is most likely going to be far less once you factor in taxes and other fees.

[patrickjp93]

37 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

No, not more so. Sweden's cities are just as dense, the fact of the matter is they make up the same portion of the population as the US, and Swedes are just as liable to live in rural areas as Americans.

 

Yeah and that poorly accessible land is also not inhabited in the US.

 

The evidence is clear: When it comes to physical accessibility and population density, Sweden has it tougher than the US when it comes to providing internet access. Yet Swedes on average get significantly faster internet for significantly lower prices than in the US. That conclusively proves the geography/demography excuses wrong.

You're seriously going to argue Stockholm and Goteborg are in the same population density league as NYC, Philadelphia, LA, or San Francisco?

 

Actually, it is in a lot of cases. The Appalachians have plenty of people. So do the Alaska outlands. There are plenty of psychos out in the Rocky Mountains too.

 

No, no it doesn't. When it comes to total scale and geological difficulty, the U.S. has it much worse to try to deploy fiber everywhere, even just hooking up all the logical places. Google even now is complaining about the costs to try to lay fiber.

 

No, it doesn't, because a much larger majority of swedes live in the big cities. 70% of Swedes live in just 25 cities in the easternmost 1/3 of the country. 60% of the U.S. lives in 300 cities across the lower 48. #getwrecked.

[Mira Yurizaki]

4 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

No, it doesn't, because a much larger majority of swedes live in the big cities. 70% of Swedes live in just 5 cities. 60% of the U.S. lives in 30 cities in 12 states that span both coasts. #getwrecked.

Where are you getting those figures from? 20% of Swedes live in the top 6 cities and 12% of people in the US live in the top 30 cities.

[AlTech]

7 hours ago, QueenDemetria said:

Using the internet is like eating Oreos, it's really good until you run out... So fuck off with your data caps.

Sponsored by Mondelez International .

 

/s

/jk

 

Ahhh. If only............

 

EDIT: Watch how nobody else knows who Mondelez even are...........

[patrickjp93]

15 minutes ago, M.Yurizaki said:

Where are you getting those figures from? 20% of Swedes live in the top 6 cities and 12% of people in the US live in the top 30 cities.

I meant to type 300, not 30 and was being hyperbolic, but the point does remain. You arrive at a majority of Sweden's population in much less area in fewer dense nodes than in the U.S. and with far less terrain to cross over far fewer and less various geological barriers such as rivers, swamps, mountains, etc....

[Yoinkerman]

Wheres that story where Comcast makes like 97 points on their high speed internet, straight from their own accounting.

 

There's no excuse.

[patrickjp93]

Just now, Yoinkerman said:

Wheres that story where Comcast makes like 97 points on their high speed internet, straight from their own accounting.

 

There's no excuse.

That's on yearly upkeep costs and doesn't reflect any startup/new equipment costs. That's purely on data transfer costs. And there are plenty of excuses. Even Google's thinking about giving up because of the real costs.

[dragosudeki]

This article doesn't really make sense. Justifying the fact that there is data-capped plans, doesn't imply you are not a greedy company for having those kinds of plans. The amount of money you pay when you go over the data cap is ridiculous and the "up to xx mbps" speeds are usually terrible misrepresentations of what you are actually getting. Instead of paying for what you can potentially use, how about letting us pay for what we actually use.

 

For example, let's say there are different tiers of capped plans (of same speed) 200GB, 500GB, unlimited. If I go use less than 200GB that month, let me pay the same amount that the 200GB plan costs. If I go over 200GB, then 500GB, and over 500GB you pay for the unlimited. Because right now, If I'm on a 200GB plan, and actually use 500GB, the costs differences are enormous. This way you can also reward those who go don't use as much data for a particular month.

[tlink]

Quote

Cable company: We're not “greedy pigs or evil villains

thats exactly what evil villains would say

[OptimisticRealist]

11 hours ago, M.Yurizaki said:

http://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2016/09/internet-data-is-like-oreos-isp-claims-while-defending-data-caps/

 

I think I found something dumber than Trump.

 

(Basically some ISP is trying to justify data caps )

This is not how you post in news section

[ivan134]

Lel. People are arguing with a corporate shill who believes in trickle down economics.

[LAwLz]

3 hours ago, patrickjp93 said:

^{At least in Ringoes, NJ, you can get 130Mb down/40 up despite being on a 50/10 plan, and from Comcast no less.}

 

^{ADSL really just can't handle much better than 20Mb/s total.}

Does the same apply for all of New York? And are there any data caps? I live in a small village in Sweden with about 700 inhabitants and we got fiber (FTTH), with the selection of 25 different carriers, and none of them have data caps.

New York has a population density of about 10,400 per km². The village I live in has a population density of about 800 per km².

 

If my village has better Internet infrastructure than one of the biggest, richest and most densily populated cities on earth, then something has gone horribly wrong.

 

 

US carriers are simply greedy assholes. Plain and simple. They have no excuses for bandwidth caps (for cable/xDSL/fiber) and the really low availability of fiber. AT&T for example could have spent billions on fiber rollout, but instead they decided to spend it on stuff like building a sports stadium (probably because they had to spend their massive profits on something, or get heavily taxed).

 

 

1 hour ago, patrickjp93 said:

That's on yearly upkeep costs and doesn't reflect any startup/new equipment costs. That's purely on data transfer costs. And there are plenty of excuses. Even Google's thinking about giving up because of the real costs.

That's like saying you shouldn't repair or build new roads because it costs money. Sorry, but in order for things to progress some money has to be spent. How about reinvesting some of your profits in order to improve your service? Yeah I know it is a wild and crazy idea, to not be a greedy asshole and provide the worst possible service and maximize profits at all costs, but it might make your customers happier and more loyal.

[patrickjp93]

6 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

Does the same apply for all of New York? And are there any data caps? I live in a small village in Sweden with about 700 inhabitants and we got fiber (FTTH), with the selection of 25 different carriers, and none of them have data caps.

New York has a population density of about 10,400 per km². The village I live in has a population density of about 800 per km².

 

If my village has better Internet infrastructure than one of the biggest, richest and most densily populated cities on earth, then something has gone horribly wrong.

 

 

US carriers are simply greedy assholes. Plain and simple. They have no excuses for bandwidth caps (for cable/xDSL/fiber) and the really low availability of fiber. AT&T for example could have spent billions on fiber rollout, but instead they decided to spend it on stuff like building a sports stadium (probably because they had to spend their massive profits on something, or get heavily taxed).

No, nothing went wrong at all. The city was developed and built up before fiber, and replacing it everywhere is incredibly expensive, so it's done in spurts from time to time, and in the meanwhile the financial trading industry built the backbone on their own dime because it actually made sense to hook up the Chicago and NY stock exchanges and build a direct line to the Hong Kong market, because trades that are late are rejected or lose value.

 

Okay, you go busting up all that concrete. Good luck with that. Swedish dirt is much easier to lay cables in. And you're also relatively close to a city or are sitting on the backbone path where it was easy to cut and splice.

 

Google has already paid 40 billion to get Google Fiber to where it is and is now considering giving up on it because of costs. It just doesn't make sense for the short term, and that means the boards of directors start firing corporate officers when they try.

[Sakkura]

2 hours ago, patrickjp93 said:

You're seriously going to argue Stockholm and Goteborg are in the same population density league as NYC, Philadelphia, LA, or San Francisco?

 

Actually, it is in a lot of cases. The Appalachians have plenty of people. So do the Alaska outlands. There are plenty of psychos out in the Rocky Mountains too.

 

No, no it doesn't. When it comes to total scale and geological difficulty, the U.S. has it much worse to try to deploy fiber everywhere, even just hooking up all the logical places. Google even now is complaining about the costs to try to lay fiber.

 

No, it doesn't, because a much larger majority of swedes live in the big cities. 70% of Swedes live in just 25 cities in the easternmost 1/3 of the country. 60% of the U.S. lives in 300 cities across the lower 48. #getwrecked.

Urban population density of Stockholm: 3600 per square km.

Urban population density of Los Angeles: 3200 per square km.

 

The Appalachians do not have plenty of people. Nor do the Alaska outlands, or the Rocky Mountains. Well over 80% of Americans live in urban areas.

 

Total scale is irrelevant, as a larger country will also have a larger population to pay for infrastructure (assuming equal population density; in this case, that actually favors the US over Sweden). Geological difficulty, as I've demonstrated, is greater for Sweden than the US. You can't just say nuh-uh in the face of proof.

 

70% of Swedes live in 25 cities in the eastern third of the country? What about its second- and third-largest cities, which are on the freaking west coast? You're spreading the most ridiculous misinformation here. Also basing it on number of cities is inane since you'd have to correct for scale. 25 cities in Sweden is comparable to about 820 cities in the US.

[LAwLz]

14 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

No, nothing went wrong at all. The city was developed and built up before fiber, and replacing it everywhere is incredibly expensive, so it's done in spurts from time to time, and in the meanwhile the financial trading industry built the backbone on their own dime.

So just like in Sweden and all other countries then? Fiber has only gained traction in the last ~20 years (and I am being generous here). Are you suggesting that Sweden and other countries with widely available high-speed Internet have not existed for more than 20 years?

 

14 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

Okay, you go busting up all that concrete. Good luck with that. Swedish dirt is much easier to lay cables in. And you're also relatively close to a city or are sitting on the backbone path where it was easy to cut and splice.

The roads in my village are concrete, not dirt. Since it is FTTH they not only had to dig up the concrete, but also drill it into peoples' homes.

So you can stop with the bullshit "Swedish dirt is easy to lay cables in".

 

As for being close to a fiber backbone path, that's true but only because they actually built it there while digging down all the cables. The fiber network stretches though several villages and connects to multiple cities (the municipalities I talked about earlier, that started this project together). It is by no means a trivial and cheap task like you try and make it sound.

 

 

 

14 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

Google has already paid 40 billion to get Google Fiber to where it is and is now considering giving up on it because of costs. It just doesn't make sense for the short term, and that means the boards of directors start firing corporate officers when they try.

Of course it doesn't make sense for the short term, and Google made it clear that they were not interested in becoming an ISP from the start. They just wanted to force ISPs in the US to start rolling out fiber, even if they had to do it themselves. You might not have noticed this, but Google are not exactly pleased with American ISPs (has at several times accused them of throttling and other bad things).

Being an ISP is not something you suddenly decide on, and then abandons. The initial investment cost is high, but you make it up over a long period of time.

[Bsmith]

US ISPs a joke? yes, a very bad one at that.

[patrickjp93]

24 minutes ago, Sakkura said:

Urban population density of Stockholm: 3600 per square km.

Urban population density of Los Angeles: 3200 per square km.

 

The Appalachians do not have plenty of people. Nor do the Alaska outlands, or the Rocky Mountains. Well over 80% of Americans live in urban areas.

 

Total scale is irrelevant, as a larger country will also have a larger population to pay for infrastructure (assuming equal population density; in this case, that actually favors the US over Sweden). Geological difficulty, as I've demonstrated, is greater for Sweden than the US. You can't just say nuh-uh in the face of proof.

 

70% of Swedes live in 25 cities in the eastern third of the country? What about its second- and third-largest cities, which are on the freaking west coast? You're spreading the most ridiculous misinformation here. Also basing it on number of cities is inane since you'd have to correct for scale. 25 cities in Sweden is comparable to about 820 cities in the US.

No, about 40% of the U.S. sub-suburban to rural. This is not new information! The census says this every 10 years! 40% of the country lives in towns no more dense than Lewisville, TX.

 

Scale always matters be it in programming, physics, or engineering. That is a statement of complete ignorance of the problem. And the more spread out population ends up paying far more per head.

 

You didn't demonstrate it and in fact I PROVED you're wrong.

 

You can get 70% of the country without those 2 cities. Look at the fiber backbone map for sweden. It's just a giant coastal ring. Very little was done through the middle. If you try and do that in the U.S. the latency will be awful, but going through the center takes you through 3 major rivers and 3 mountain ranges.

 

It's not insane. Where the cities are the costs can be best amortized. Unfortunately that effects dies as the cities are spread out, but hey, don't take my word for it. Go ask any civil engineer you like. I did account for it. That's why you're wrong.

[SteveGrabowski0]

Fuck the analogies. This is about cable companies wanting to make netflix and other streaming services expensive because they're scared shitless that their cash cow is viewed as antiquated by everyone under 30. Almost everyone I know under 30 has cut the cord, and why not? You watch netflix and you pay a monthly fee to see what you want when you want and aren't spammed with commercials. Commercials make sense for OTA broadcast channels since you don't pay for them, but why the fuck are you supposed to watch commercials on cable tv when you have paid for that service already?

[patrickjp93]

20 minutes ago, LAwLz said:

So just like in Sweden and all other countries then? Fiber has only gained traction in the last ~20 years (and I am being generous here). Are you suggesting that Sweden and other countries with widely available high-speed Internet have not existed for more than 20 years?

 

The roads in my village are concrete, not dirt. Since it is FTTH they not only had to dig up the concrete, but also drill it into peoples' homes.

So you can stop with the bullshit "Swedish dirt is easy to lay cables in".

 

As for being close to a fiber backbone path, that's true but only because they actually built it there while digging down all the cables. The fiber network stretches though several villages and connects to multiple cities (the municipalities I talked about earlier, that started this project together). It is by no means a trivial and cheap task like you try and make it sound.

 

 

 

Of course it doesn't make sense for the short term, and Google made it clear that they were not interested in becoming an ISP from the start. They just wanted to force ISPs in the US to start rolling out fiber, even if they had to do it themselves. You might not have noticed this, but Google are not exactly pleased with American ISPs (has at several times accused them of throttling and other bad things).

Being an ISP is not something you suddenly decide on, and then abandons. The initial investment cost is high, but you make it up over a long period of time.

And getting the fiber to a small village was mostly via the dirt. Digging up NYC would cost probably 200 billion USD after you account for the economic hampering it would cause to shut down streets for any length of time. And it would take years. It doesn't make sense to do it until copper has been pushed to its limits and fiber is cheaper than ever to get.

 

No, but the fiber backbone for most of Europe was laid by the U.S. in the post-WWII years, so you're actually underestimating the time fiber has been around and how much easier it was to put it in so long ago.

 

It's not BS.

 

It is trivial and cheap on the scale that is Sweden, especially since the U.S. did the heavy lifting by linking the major cities so long ago.

 

And making it up over 40 years is something most publicly owned companies cannot do, because the boards of directors will have the corporate officers fired.

[patrickjp93]

4 minutes ago, SteveGrabowski0 said:

Fuck the analogies. This is about cable companies wanting to make netflix and other streaming services expensive because they're scared shitless that their cash cow is viewed as antiquated by everyone under 30. Almost everyone I know under 30 has cut the cord, and why not? You watch netflix and you pay a monthly fee to see what you want when you want and aren't spammed with commercials. Commercials make sense for OTA broadcast channels since you don't pay for them, but why the fuck are you supposed to watch commercials on cable tv when you have paid for that service already?

No they aren't. They could start up streaming services themselves and be cheaper than Netflix long before Netflix actually ate into their profits. And Netflix is still going deeper in debt, so it's not that popular...

 

You get commercials because the telecomms get paid millions to display them.

[SteveGrabowski0]

2 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

They could start up streaming services themselves and be cheaper than Netflix long before Netflix actually ate into their profits.

That doesn't make any sense for them to start a streaming service cheaper than Netflix that would be competing with their expensive TV plans.

[Nineshadow]

@patrickjp93 It's funny how you defend the absurd practices of US ISPs with the simple fact that "the US is really large, git gud". Russia is even bigger, yet they have faster(?) and cheaper internet, without data caps. But with Roskomnadzor, of course.

[♠FlamieMeister♠]

Nokia pl0x spread 1 terabyte internet

 

[Sakkura]

24 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

No, about 40% of the U.S. sub-suburban to rural. This is not new information! The census says this every 10 years! 40% of the country lives in towns no more dense than Lewisville, TX.

 

Scale always matters be it in programming, physics, or engineering. That is a statement of complete ignorance of the problem. And the more spread out population ends up paying far more per head.

 

You didn't demonstrate it and in fact I PROVED you're wrong.

 

You can get 70% of the country without those 2 cities. Look at the fiber backbone map for sweden. It's just a giant coastal ring. Very little was done through the middle. If you try and do that in the U.S. the latency will be awful, but going through the center takes you through 3 major rivers and 3 mountain ranges.

 

It's not insane. Where the cities are the costs can be best amortized. Unfortunately that effects dies as the cities are spread out, but hey, don't take my word for it. Go ask any civil engineer you like. I did account for it. That's why you're wrong.

Lewisville, TX has a population of about 100K. That would rank it among the ten largest cities in Sweden. Is that really the "worst" you got?

 

No, you were the one who failed to take scale into account, so that ignorance is yours. Yes, a more spread out population should pay more per head - but as I've proven, the Swedish population is more spread out than the American population, and yet Swedes pay less and get a superior product.

 

Again you try to just blindly claim you're right. The facts do not agree with you, I'm sorry.

 

The fiber backbone in Sweden is not a coastal ring. There's a big trunk going from Stockholm to Oslo overland, another going overland to Gothenburg, and another south through the middle of Småland. This is very similar to the US, where the main direct links between the west and east coast are also overland.

 

Spread out cities are just as much a thing in Sweden as in the US, if not more so. Sweden's three largest urban areas are all separate, whereas the US has big clusters on the east and west coast.

[LAwLz]

21 minutes ago, patrickjp93 said:

 

No, but the fiber backbone for most of Europe was laid by the U.S. in the post-WWII years, so you're actually underestimating the time fiber has been around and how much easier it was to put it in so long ago.

[Citation Needed]

 

Please bear in mind that fiber were not used for communication until many centuries after World War 2, so claiming that the US build EU's fiber network shortly after WW2 would be hilarious. Not to mention that Canada was far bigger than the US when it came to fiber deployment in ~1980 when it first started gaining traction (although it was a long way from FTTH like we have today).

 

 

You know what, fuck it. There is no point in arguing with you because it's like you live in a completely different dimension. Losing an argument? Just make some shit up, never provide a source for it and then claim you won. That's your standard tactic. It would just be a waste of time trying to reason with you that American ISPs are greedy and other countries are doing a far better job investing money into building fiber networks. Several state funded Swedish cities goes together to build better networks? Nahh, let's just make a bullshit claim that it is actually the US that built it.

 

It must be nice to dream when you're wide awake.