Re: Paying for delivery of packets (was about Sprint Peering, and Importance of Content)

[Barney Wolff <barney () tp databus com>]

On Thu, Jul 11, 2002 at 08:00:45PM -0700, JC Dill wrote:
> The problem with asymmetric pricing is that the cost of passing the packets 
> is equally born by both ends.  Take 2 networks that peer, one with mostly 
> content, one with mostly eyeballs.  The content providers pay a higher 
> price *per MB* for bandwidth to their provider than the end user does, but 
> both networks have equal costs in transiting the packets from the server to 
> the end user.

This might be true per Mbps of capacity, but is simply not true per average
user's MB/month.  The typical cable/dsl subscriber still only uses about 
5-10 Kbps, averaged over a month.  If lots of people start watching video
streams for much of the day, current cable/dsl rates will not survive.

-- 
Barney Wolff
I never met a computer I didn't like.