“As in… If I setup a Gbit pipeline but it only sees 10mbit of traffic, that doesn’t mean it is cheaper to run than if it saw 100mbit or 500mbit of traffic is it?”

Yes it does, the problem must be looked at holistically.

If you have gigabit interfaces running at 10 or 50 or 500 Mbps, the cost of that particular link (including the cable and the equipment on both ends) stays the same (ignoring small electric bill costs). However, it makes a huge difference upstream in terms of backhaul and transit capacity because those would have to be upgraded at huge initial and recurring expense.

“The cost of the high quality fiber plant that’s already in place remains the same, but tell that to the router and switch equipment manufacturers. It costs a lot of money to transmit more data over the same fiber.”

What I felt the Comcast rep was trying to imply is that there was increased revolving costs associated with their network seeing increased traffic (revolving as in Labor, HVAC, Electricity, etc. NOT equipment, construction or other fixed costs). I guess that is where I’m confused. I understand that you have to invest in your network to ensure that the capacity to transmit is in place (and that costs a lot of money but is a fixed cost). But once you purchase and setup your pipeline (to include the routers, switches, etc.) at a certain capacity (be it X bps) the revolving costs don’t significantly change according to its usage…

do they?

As in… If I setup a Gbit pipeline but it only sees 10mbit of traffic, that doesn’t mean it is cheaper to run than if it saw 100mbit or 500mbit of traffic is it?

I can understand a trivial increase in power consumption (making the light flash at the end of the fiber) and then HVAC (to cool the light/router/cpu/etc.) but what other costs are there?

Does increased traffic over a connection directly tie to labor for monitoring the connection? Are there other costs?

I’ve only had experience working on small (non ISP scope) networks, but I know that the costs of keeping the network up over the weekends and holidays (when traffic sinks to near 0) vs during business hours (when the network is significantly busy) are the same… The capacity cost money, but I’ve never seen that “Traffic results in cost.”

To make such a broad statement seems to feel like the Comcast rep is trying to twist the truth and mislead the public into thinking that this is costing them more money when it is not…

“but whether or not you are transferring 1 bit or 100Mbit over your ____Mbps line, your costs are the same…”

The cost of the high quality fiber plant that’s already in place remains the same, but tell that to the router and switch equipment manufacturers. It costs a lot of money to transmit more data over the same fiber.

So you’ve fooled yourself into believing that more capacity costs nothing extra when you’re only looking at a small fraction of the equation.

Think about it. Comcast is trying to charge content providers to access to its customers… Customers which it has a monopoly to.

Can anyone explain how/why ISP’s are given monopoly rights to service areas and how their abuse of this access monopoly to extort content provider is not malicious or harmful?

Why does the provider have to pay the requester of data? Wouldn’t that be like the grocery store paying me if I asked for a banana? It seems backwards if Comcast customers are asking for more product that the provider of that data would have to pay them to deliver it…

Is the internet backwards?

“Peering has never worked that way, and economically it can’t work that way.” –J T. Ramsay (Comcast) replied to comment from David

I don’t understand this statement? CAN’T work this way? Since when have content providers had to pay to deliver. It seems that internet peering is the ONLY system where the market forces have not straightened out the value in the system. CONSUMERS pay for content. Comcast is CONSUMING L3′s content.

It wont happen but I would imagine things would work MUCH better if the internet worked the way the rest of the world does and the CONSUMERS paid, not the providers.