Re: Some truth about Comcast - WikiLeaks style

[Dave Temkin <davet1 () gmail com>]

Jeff Wheeler wrote:
> On Thu, Dec 16, 2010 at 12:15 PM, Dave Temkin <davet1 () gmail com> wrote:
>   
> > I disagree.  Even at $1/Mbit and 6Tbit of traffic (they do more), that's
> > still $72M/year in revenue that they weren't recognizing before.  Given that
> > that traffic was actually *costing* them money to absorb before, turning the
> > balance and making that kind of money would be very favorably looked upon in
> >     
>
> Yeah, because it makes a lot of sense to fuck with a billion dollar a
> month revenue stream so you can extract a few million dollars more per
> month from IP carriers.  This definitely makes more sense than, say,
> running the billion dollar a month side a little more efficiently.
>
> You need to understand the scale of comcast's expenses and revenue on
> the access and transport side of their business, in order to have a
> remotely intelligent opinion about whether or not they are doing
> anything smart with the peering/transit side, in these conditions.
>   

I do.  And yes, they are happy to "fuck with a billion dollar a month 
revenue stream" (that happens to be low margin) in order to set a 
precedent so that when traffic is 60Tbit instead of 6Tbit, across the 
*same* customer base they have today that's insisting on getting that 
$19.99/month promo deal for life they make up the infrastructure 
investment on the backs of the content providers and not their 
customers.   $1B/month from your customers + $1B/month from your content 
providers is what they'd ideally like to see and this is just laying the 
groundwork for it.

They have a captive audience.  What percentage of their customers who 
they're offering 10Mbit+ connections to do you think have a 10Mbit+ 
alternative?  It's not very many.


-Dave