> 1000X more? Not by the source article: 50GB/$10 is $0.20/GB which is less than 2X AWS/Google's wholesale $0.12/GB.
AWS/Google retail bandwidth prices are a bad comparison, as they are ridiculously expensive compared to wholesale bandwidth prices.
Wholesale bandwidth costs about 0.1 cents per GB. Not quite 1000X what Comcast charges, it's "only" 100X the wholesale rate.
To give you some perspective, Dane Jasper, CEO of Sonic.net said they spend about 3% of their costs on bandwidth. Please consider that Sonic is a small actor and at scale costs will be less.
Just kidding. Seriously though, you are not going to see wholesale rates posted on a website. Contact your bandwidth provider and ask for a quote. For serious volumes and good pricing, expect to sign an NDA.
However, to give you an idea of lowend pricing here are some examples from FDCservers. This is not an endorsement, just a site with easily accessible prices that I could remember off the top of my head. In fact, I emphatically do not recommend them. There are much better providers both in terms of price and quality.
Remember 0.1 cents per GB equals about $0.30 per Mbps.
$0.003/GB is what $1/1Mbps is, at 100% utilization. 324GB is what 1Mbps can do in a month. Perhaps a bit less but low quality providers (HE, Cogent) will do a dollar a Mbps easily. So work backwards. (Another way, you need 3kbps to do 1GB in a month. That times 333 is about 1Mbps, so $1. I'm ignoring 95th percentile billing here.)
Better providers like L3 are around $3/Mbps, last I heard.
So $0.001 a GB means you'd only pay 33 cents per Mbps, which seems pretty low. But maybe at terabit commits, HE goes even lower.. I've only looked at 10G commits.
You can get a dedicated gigabit line for like a grand a month - possibly less - which if you max out 24/7 gets you like 300 terabytes of bandwidth = $0.00333 - and one gigabit line is hardly wholesale.
HE is just an example, the other transit providers will match and beat those prices at wholesale scales. For an ISP the wholesale rate is the same as the DC rate.
We are not talking about individuals buying retail bandwidth here.
The parent comment was talking about comparing Comcast retail prices to AWS retail prices. The story is talking about Xfinity retail plans.
It doesn't make sense to compare retail prices to wholesale prices. If an average coder can't even get bandwidth at $0.001/GB with some serious effort, then how this this a valid point of comparison for how much bandwidth should cost for the average internet user?
I doubt you can get Level3 or Internap to beat HE prices.
> It doesn't make sense to compare retail prices to wholesale prices.
It very much does. It gives you a sense of real world marginal costs, a fair assessment of fair market value (fair retail cost = reasonable markup factor * wholesale cost) and a sense of scale.
> If an average coder can't even get bandwidth at $0.001/GB with some serious effort,
If I can, you can. I've even given examples with links to order pages. Not that I recommend FDCservers, mind you.
> then how this this a valid point of comparison for how much bandwidth should cost for the average internet user?
It's a valid point because it tells you how much bandwidth ACTUALLY costs compared to what Comcast says it costs.
> I doubt you can get Level3 or Internap to beat HE prices.
How much money do you have on you? There's a bet I'd like to win.
I don't think you have any clue what you are talking about. First of all, you are comparing apples to oranges.
Commit to a single DC is not the same thing as metered bandwidth to thousands of customers.
- Running fiber to a DC is way easier than running it house that could be in the middle of nowhere.
- Commit != selling bandwidth by the byte. I think you fail to understand this. I don't have the time to explain this in detail to you anymore as I've already spent more time than I wanted to writing the rest of this.
> If I can, you can. I've even given examples with links to order pages. Not that I recommend FDCservers, mind you.
Uh still wrong, and not even close even if you include FDCservers.
1GBPS $2500/328717GB = $0.007/GB
10GBPS $15000/3287170GB = $0.004/GB
Where's the $0.001/GB?
A page asking you to contact their sales team is not an example. If you are buying transit you need to be in the proper DC and you need to colo. This is out of reach for most programmers that deploy on EC2 or Digital Ocean.
> How much money do you have on you? There's a bet I'd like to win.
You're probably going to make another flawed comparison that you can get tier 1 bandwidth lower than HE by buying some absurd amount of commit. Feel free to prove me wrong with actual quotes.
And that only kicks in after the first 300GB.