Yep, you caught me. I pocketed that $15 a month and … well, no, not really.
ISP’s make money buying very expensive bandwidth and selling it a lot cheaper. Really.
Remember I told you that bandwidth costs a little over $100 per month per megabit? That’s not too far off.
“But I heard all these ISP’s get bandwidth from each other for free, you big liar!”
Sometimes, they do. I personally made a lot of deals for what’s called “settlement-free peering” with other carriers. But the fact that I’m not writing a check to the company I’m plugged into, doesn’t make it anywhere near free. First, I have to buy more equipment. And this is the heavy iron. Six-digit price tags very typical. Rack space costs money. In a popular data center, expect to pay $1,200 per month for a single rack. Plus power – that big Cisco box with the dual DC power feeds? $700 a month to keep it running. Want a dial-up line to manage it? $300 a month (no, I’m not making that up) If you nab a high-volume peer, you’re going to need a cross-connect to them, figure $500 a month. And you’re going to need an OC-OMG backhaul to this peering point, which isn’t going to be cheap, especially if you want it to be redundant.
I sat down and did the math and figured out that “free” peering typically cost me about $70 per mb/month, once I realized all the other costs. So it *can* be cheaper, but it’s not a guarantee, and you have to plan and use it very efficiently for it to make any sense at all.
So much like the traditional landline telephone, you can sell that $500-a-month circuit to 90 people for $40 each – just as long as they don’t all try to actually use it.
Hence the problem. It’s difficult for even a dedicated gossip to stay on the phone 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. But I can leave my computer on all the time and it’s quite capable of tearing through immense amounts of bandwidth. Phone companies panic when an episode of “American Idol” airs. Really. ISP’s panic the day after a new “Galactica” episode airs.
Remember those figures about bandwidth? A typical household only costs the ISP about four bucks for bandwidth. But they have, let’s assume, a 6mb/s connection. If they run it at 100%, for six hours a month, that one account ends up being a net liability.
If they can flat-top that circuit 10% of the time, that $14 in profit has just turned into $120 in costs, or essentially negating the profit of almost 10 customers.
(ok, a confession is in order here: While in my tenure as the head of engineering at an ISP, I used to keep a good eye on forum postings in a few reputable sites such as dslreports.com as an early-warning system for problems. More than once, I spotted posts that helpfully provided enough specifics – a symptom, a location, a time range, and even a graph sometimes. While it would have been improper to respond in public, I can personally say that two well-informed posters helped me justify an emergency network upgrade affecting over 210,000 households. So you guys aren’t talking to air, the people who actually will fix your problem are listening, even if they can’t talk back.)
Then there’s support. Remember truck rolls? Well, the family that uses the web to send email and occasionally download a movie from itunes, they’ll never notice momentary packet loss due to network congestion. But the guy who’s got six torrents running, he’ll notice it, even if it happened during a 2am planned maintenance window. He’s going to complain. He’s going to need three or four truck rolls. He’s going to call the support center much more often.
It’s harder to do than you might think. Even with totally indiscriminate use of streaming video, voice, lots of downloads, and being completely sloppy and leaving VPN connections up, I can’t even break an average of 300kb/s on my personal connection, averaged over a month. And I’ve tried, mind you, even with a commercial-rate account that has high upload and download speeds, at several times residential rates. Yeah, I can run the connection at 8mb/s for an hour solid with a couple good downloads, but.. that’s only one hour. It takes me 7 minutes to download one hour of high-quality video. Even if I turn into Jabba the Hut on the couch, there’s only so much you can do.
Ah, but torrents. They’re a different animal. First, they’re sloppy. The high error rates due to congested or dead peers mean often that the traffic may be several times the actual data transmitted. Deliberate poisoning by content owners makes the problem worse. The router upstream from you needs to track 50 times as many ip “pairings”, meaning more CPU, more memory, and more likelihood of problems affecting other users.
Note that I don’t give a flying f*ck what’s in the torrent. Family movies, tv shows, tentacle porn, it’s all the same to me, it’s just bits. (personally, I like porn, but generally the mostly plain stuff. I find it hard to empathize with an eight-armed creature of unknown origin and figure out whether they’re having fun, or are just performing some tedious and unpleasant task.)
Ok. Cool. So the telco’s and ISP’s are usually making a profit, even if it’s not exactly the piles of cash we all hoped it would be back in 1998. What the hell does this have to do with diet soda?
Posted by oopsmybad 