On Mon, 2007-09-03 at 12:40 +0100, Jeroen Massar wrote:
> > It's becoming a big issue with P2P putting ever more pressure on
> > contention ratio, someone is going to have to pay and it will be the
> > consumer if the consumer decides that P2P is that important.
> [..]
>> What you are actually saying is that a lot of ISP's rely on selling a
> 'big package for a lot of money' while never being able to actually
> provide the service they are advertising.
No, I am trying to say that the reason end users don't have to pay the
true bandwidth costs of a couple of hundred euro per meg delivered is
because of contention ratios.
the cost of transit in 1G + amounts in Dublin is really only a tiny part
of the overall cost of delivering this bandwidth to lots and lots of end
users
> Oh and please don't try to point me to why Internet Exchanges are a good
> thing, do you have any nice tees from them? :)
>> Also looking at https://www.inex.ie/technical/stats at not even 1Gbps
> and comparing that to http://www.ams-ix.net/technical/stats/ at almost
> 300Gbps, then comparing .ie with 6 million people and .nl with a little
> less than 17 million, I am missing the factor 300 in traffic.
In Ireland we have a couple of interesting problems
1/ Eircom is a very large player relative to the other ISP's in Ireland,
in effect a lot of inter ireland traffic never leaves their own network
so itwon;t show up at INEX
2/ Many of the bigger players notably 'a big CATV outfit' and the Tier
ones won't peer with ISP's
>> This clearly shows that quite some local traffic is missing, which
> indicates that quite a large amount of traffic is most likely going over
> transit to for instance the ams-ix. (at least I guess this is the
> case). Clearly content providers don't see a real usage for Ireland
> there as they can't 'save' money by moving boxes over here.
Akami are here, I hope more will follow. problem is that we are a small
market
> It might
> also simply be way too expensive for them and just keeping their boxes
> local to either amsix or linx in London is a better choice.
>> This does translate into the Irish ISPs having higher transit costs
> (that cable through the sea to London is solely for them almost) and
> that of course comes back to the end-user.
Yes but the biggest factor for the nd user is the cost of getting around
the country, It costs more to get from Dublin to galway than it does
from Dublin to the rest of teh world. This holds true for pretty much
any size of pipe. As for getting someplace not on ESB/ESAT fibre the
costs are enormous and pipesizes limited.
> [..]
> > Content provider buys hosting capacity someplace and funds the delivery
> > bandwidth requirements (as they bloody well should)
> > Normal ISP strategies such as sensible local peering arrangements (INEX
> > etc see here *) caching etc help manage the transit costs.
>> Unless the P2P protocol is actually smart and makes every client in the
> local ISP network only talk to the local ISPs client, which means that
> the traffic doesn't bounce over the transit link and that the content
> provider doesn't have to provide boxes all around the world.
yes, I have yet to see a P2P system that was actually doing this
effectively though.
This still does not take into account that the real costs are the
transit costs within the country and the inherent contention built into
CATV and wireless last mile
>> Setups like Akamai actually do provide boxes around the world and that
> might work for big enterprises with cash and direct revenue, it doesn't
> for a lot of other setups.
>> And do remember the main reason why p2p exists: for that nice free video
> that you didn't want to pay for.
My point is that someone has to pay for it.
> At least for most people on this planet
> that is the case, they don't care about "Linux DVDs", which btw are much
> much much faster to download from your local ftp.heanet.ie mirror which
> nicely spits at 2MiB/s here to my local laptop behind a very sweet dsl
> line (thanks Colin and HEAnet! :) Using p2p for that would take me ages
> as there are no peers which will spit at me that fast.
HEANET peers with pretty muc hevery provider in the INEX too, which
helps
>> They should. I would *LOVE* to pay for my transit the prices that the
> ISP pays to their transits. Would make Internet usage so bloody cheap,
> especially in this country where prices are quite overinflated when you
> compare them to other countries.
Then you are forgetting about the other costs that the ISP's have, these
make up the bulk of the costs to the end user. ISP's are not running
with large profit margins in this country
>> Then again I also realize that a lot of my friends and colleagues
> actually also need to earn some money.
>> And also the other point that the Internet here is only in the beginning
> and that quite a number of companies still have to earn back all the
> investments in hardware and especially the last mile to the user.
there is a lot of new investment required if we are to even catch up
with the rest of Europe.
>> > 2/ Content owners pay for all their bandwidth and hosting, ISP charges
> > remain broadly the same (relative to the market conditions)
>> You really think that content hosters don't:
> - pay for their hosting (the servers, the power, location etc)
> - pay for transit to their transit providers?
>> I would really love to be a content provider that didn't have to pay for
> those things :)
>> Remember that they are charged by their transits also.
of course but they are buying big pipes in well located datacentres and
get the very best possible rates
>> Guess who is making the big money here: indeed the transits, charging
> for both the receiving ISP and the sending ISP, win win win win win!
which is why neutral Peering is important to keep the transits
competitive
> This is the current situation, and a lot of these providers logically
> want to lessen the cash they have to spend on bandwidth costs. Folks who
> run the WoW networks and especially the updates of it, love it, as they
> don't have to spend really insane amounts of money on infrastructure,
> thus lowering their costs, thus in the end lowering the costs of the
> price of the product as everybody is paying for it in another way ;)
Problem is that the ISP's are going to have a hard time passing this
cost onto the consumers without them 'revolting' ;-)
> > It is worth noting that for content providers, the cost per meg at the
> > scale that they are buying at, is a great deal cheaper than ANY ISP can
> > hope to deliver the same meg to an end user at.
>> Maybe because the ISP people also have infrastructure to invest for like
> that last mile loop which really has to be dug into the ground?
There are a lot more back-end costs to an ISP than just the last mile
> Content providers do have a small advantage there of course, they just
> hang up boxes close to the DC of a well established IX.
> > I suspect that content providers choice is not going to be the same as
> > the Internet user's choice however bandwidth economics make this choice
> > real.
> >
> > personally I think P2P is in most cases a con job.
>> The real "Con Job" is the ISP trying to sell you a service for a lot of
> cash while not actually being able to sell that service at that price.
OK, hands up who wants to pay 200 Euro per month per meg for high
quality uncontended bandwidth, Contention is not a con, just part of the
way that the Internet has worked, P2P changes that and the economic
realities of this need to be considered
.brendan
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