[94047] in North American Network Operators' Group
Re: Network end users to pull down 2 gigabytes a day, continuously?
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Joe Abley)
Sun Jan 7 15:09:23 2007
In-Reply-To: <200701071517.PAA10001@sunf10.rd.bbc.co.uk>
Cc: nanog@merit.edu
From: Joe Abley <jabley@ca.afilias.info>
Date: Sun, 7 Jan 2007 15:07:45 -0500
To: Brandon Butterworth <brandon@rd.bbc.co.uk>
Errors-To: owner-nanog@merit.edu
On 7-Jan-2007, at 15:17, Brandon Butterworth wrote:
>> The only time that costs increase is when I download
>> data from outside of BT's network because the increased
>> traffic reaquires larger circuits or more circuits, etc.
>
> Incorrect, DSLAM backhaul costs regardless of where the traffic
> comes from. ISPs pay for that, it costs more than transit
Setting aside the issue of what particular ISPs today have to pay,
the real cost of sending data, best-effort over an existing network
which has spare capacity and which is already supported and managed
is surely zero.
If I acquire content while I'm sleeping, during a low dip in my ISP's
usage profile, the chances good that are nobody incurs more costs
that month than if I had decided not to acquire it. (For example, you
might imagine an RSS feed with BitTorrent enclosures, which requires
no human presence to trigger the downloads.)
If I acquire content the same time as many other people, since what
I'm watching is some coordinated, streaming event, then it seems far
more likely that the popularity of the content will lead to network
congestion, or push up a peak on an interface somewhere which will
lead to a requirement for a circuit upgrade, or affect a 95%ile
transit cost, or something.
If asynchronous delivery of content is as free as I think it is, and
synchronous delivery of content is as expensive as I suspect it might
be, it follows that there ought to be more of the former than the
latter going on.
If it turned out that there was several orders of magnitude more
content being shifted around the Internet in a "download when you are
able; watch later" fashion than there is content being streamed to
viewers in real-time I would be thoroughly unsurprised.
Joe
