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When ISPs sell to each other they use a "95th percentile" standard. The mbps usage rate you're just below 95% of the time is what you get billed for.

That's technically true, but misleading.

Lots of ISPs do no-cost peering, they trade traffic in internet exchange points

But more importantly, wholesale IP transit pricing is orders of magnitude cheaper than what Comcast, et al are charging. Once you do the math to convert to bytes/month its less than $5/TB. You can argue about peak versus baseline, and fixed infrastructure costs, etc. But ultimately the mark-up is at a level that could not survive a break-up of the last-mile monopoly.

There are way more Internet users outside of the US many of them with faster Internet at cheaper rates. The two biggest Internet exchanges are in Frankfurt (DE-CIX) and Amsterdam (AMS-IX) and in terms of traffic peaks and traffic transfers they leave the US as a tiny dot in their rear-view mirror. The biggest e-commerce market in the world when measured by the amount spent per capita? The UK, in 2010. The e-commerce market in absolute numbers in China will at least equal but probably surpass the US in 2013. And that's only one of the BRIC countries. Now add Japan (Rakuten) and Europe and it's easy to see that the Internet is global and definitely not US centric. Anyone who thinks that follies like Facebook, Twitter, Tumblr and Instagram make up the majority of the Intertubes is probably American, thinks Fox News tells the truth and has never left his/her country :-) The same goes for those fine optical cables transporting all those cat videos. Most cables are not owned by US companies. And most cables are not even near the US. US companies may lease fibre in those cables but that's not the same. Have a look at all submarine cables here: http://submarine-cable-map-2013.telegeography.com/ Building your own Internet is a matter of finding the cash, hiring one of those cable ships and put your cable between point A and B. Next thing you will do is hook it up to an Internet exchange at which point it will start to transport traffic from the US (the NSA, cat videos) and to the US (the NSA backup, when posting, tweeting, tumblering and instagramming about those cat videos). The only place where the Internet is US centric is in regulatory control: ICANN. It's time ICANN got replaced by an extension of the IETF located outside of the US in a neutral place like Switzerland. ICANN can keep .com, and .mil but anything else should get transferred to the new organization. And no I will not hold my breath for that to happen any time soon.

So, what do ISPs do? They oversubscribe

Caps do not fix the problems of over-subscription. The majority of customers will all have the same usage patterns - basically heavy usage during prime-time and a trickle the rest of the day. Restricting the total gigabytes downloaded by the month can only minimally improve congestion during prime-time ... it does nothing until a couple of weeks into the month when people start to hit their limits and can't download anything at all, otherwise they still go full speed during prime-time.

Furthermore, the modern ISP has huge, huge margins on bandwidth. Like 90+ % gross margins - the vast majority of an ISP's cost are in the infrastructure (cables, equipment, staff) not in bandwidth itself. Wholesale bandwidth pricing itself has been dropping like a stone, reducing by at least 30% a year for many years now and has recently accelerated to about 50% a year.

http://www.telegeography.com/products/commsupdate/articles/2012/08/02/ip-transit-price-declines-steepen/

Download caps are just a wholly inappropriate tool for fixing problems with over-subscription. They are, however, fantastic for hurting competing businesses like NetFlix and Hulu.

Yeah, and it wouldn't bee too hard to figure out where this secret location is either.
You could just pick likely places from here: http://www.telegeography.com/telecom-resources/submarine-cable-landing-directory/
Gibraltar would be a good guess.

Not only is Gibraltar not in the Middle East, but it's also a British territory so it is considered part of Britain. If that was the case the headline would be a lot less interesting: "British running secret surveillance base in Great Britain."

Yeah, and it wouldn't bee too hard to figure out where this secret location is either. You could just pick likely places from here: http://www.telegeography.com/telecom-resources/submarine-cable-landing-directory/ Gibraltar would be a good guess.

For the more visually inclined, a graphical map.

And based on that, I'll give dollars to doughnuts that it's Egypt. Virtually all traffic between Europe and Asia transits through the Suez canal.

But my guess would be the whole episode of the UK Gov't detaining Mr. Miranda and forcing The Guarding to shred some systems seriously pissed off the British Press. Releasing UK-specific material is most likely payback. Spreading it around to other papers is most likely a signal that "threaten the Guardian with prior restraint, you better be ready to shut down every paper in the UK". GCHQ and Whitehall fucked up royally with that and they are now going to pay for threatening a major newspaper.

Just a guess, mind you.

Yeah, and it wouldn't bee too hard to figure out where this secret location is either.
You could just pick likely places from here: http://www.telegeography.com/telecom-resources/submarine-cable-landing-directory/
Gibraltar would be a good guess.

Australia can simply filter dns responses as they reach the mainland, since theres only one or two lines entering the country.

You must be using out-of-date info from someone like telegeography. Even The Guardian shows six internet cables coming into Australia and Greg's Cable Map shows seven (plus two to Papua New Guinea and Vanuatu).

But in future, payment, which is expected to cost a single-digit euro sum, will be via mobile phone, Ametsreiter said.

Ah the irony...I personally welcome new healthy ideas into any market. (Free market with healthy regulation, whatever no political arguments needed here)

Some more info:

Telekom Austria's charging stations will leverage the group’s existing infrastructure: the company currently operates 13,500 telephone booths countrywide, of which 700 are multimedia stations. In the first phase, the focus will be on multimedia stations that offer on-street parking opportunities for electric vehicles. By installing additional charging points, each telephone booth will be able to recharge more than one vehicle at a time. By year-end 2010 a total of 30 charging stations will be on stream. According to a survey by Verkehsclub Osterreich, an association promoting environmentally sustainable, socially just and economically efficient mobility, the number of electric vehicles will significantly increase in Austria over the next few years, with e-scooters exceeding 60,000 and e-cars 115,000 by 2015.

http://www.telegeography.com/cu/article.php?article_id=33006&email=html

Yes they did not go out on a limb to invest in phone booths, but using existing architecture in an economically and environmentally friendly way to address an emerging market, nice.

Rogers had an exclusive deal to sell iPhones in Canada. Starting in November, Bell and Telus will also be selling iPhones.

Interestingly enough, Bell's existing network is CDMA, not GSM. Bell and Telus partnered to build a new HSPA network to compete with Rogers.

As I just mentioned in another post, in South Africa, I pay around $15 for 2GB of data per month. That's excluding line rental. After that, its around $9-$10/GB. Fastest home DSL line speed available is officially 1MB/s, going up to 4MB/s depending on your line quality and distance from the exchange.
Local bandwidth (connecting to South African hosts) is dirt cheap, but international is pretty much daylight robbery. The US has the benefit that most datacenters are hosted in the US already, and the US also has a huge number of undersea cables running from all over the coastlines to Europe and Asia where most of the rest of the internet is hosted. The whole of Africa has a tiny number of cables, meaning that internet access is hideously expensive.

http://www.nrc.nl/multimedia/archive/00170/270808ECO_glasvezel_170984a.jpg
http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/images/Cable_Map_big.gif

It always amuses me that people from the US complain when their ISPs threaten to impose 100GB/month caps. You guys have absolutely no idea how lucky you are.

I don't think this is a single point of failure. Now, of course I didn't read the article, but according to this map of submarine communications cables, middle east has more than one cable reaching it.

This to be followed by googles entry into the ISP market?

Google was in the ISP business, offering WiFi, but got out or is getting out of it. Just as Earthlink and others have found out it's hard to make money with free muni-wifi.

Though there is a slightly bigger version here, ostensibly for desktop background usage.

1. There already are millions of miles of undersea cables.
2. They are mapped. example
3. ROVs have cameras and scanning sonar so the pilot can see where he is going. They are not autonomous.
4. Sonar and magnetometer scans of the cable run are done preburial to verify the ground.

so whats the issue? there more than enough bandwidth thanks to the dot com boom and relatively cheap costs of adding more capacity

http://www.telegeography.com/products/gb/pdf/Executive_Summary.pdf

seems some companies are trying to make it appear as bandwidth is a limited resource thats in short supply...

Then their story has changed, hasn't it?
http://www.telegeography.com/cu/article.php?article_id=21206/

This reminds me of something that happens in the newspapers every few years in my country. In a slow news cycle, the newspapers will begin to report every incident where a child catches meningococcal disease. By simple statistics, during the winter months you can almost guarentee a spike of such incidents. The disease is unfortunately sometimes fatal in children which makes it particularly newsworthy. Within a matter of weeks, you'll see headlines screaming about an epidemic outbreak as the sixth child gets infected - selling more newspapers than ever as concerned parents rush to read the latest news.

I've seen the map of the world's undersea cables and there are a whole bunch of them. It seems to me that for all we know, the average failure rate is only 50% of the incidence we're currently seeing - this is just a random spike of events which is only twice the background rate of regular mishaps, for example.

The previous "worst week" for cable cuttings might have easily been, say, 2 cables. So, now we have 4 (and not all were cut) so we're only running at double the previous peak, and that probably happened a few years ago when there was, say, 20-30% less thousands of kilometers of cable laid.

Does anyone have any info that might help for this? I cut code for a livin', not crunch numbers.

-M

Check out this poster from which they made the graphic:

http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/index.php

If it wasn't $250 I might pick one up.

Well it is about 8" diameter for shallow waters, and it is buried for shore to shallow water, and they steadily reduce the armouring down to nothing for deep water, that right a 1.6Tera-bit cable is about 27mm diameter in deep water.
The usual spot for breaks is around Hong Kong... Lots of cables and lots of shipping in the same location keeps the cable repair boats quite busy.

http://telegeography.com/products/map_cable/index.php for a view of the routes

Here is another map, from the same company that made the one on C|Net: http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_cable/index.php

You can find additional information about this fault, a mapof all the submarine cables in the Med, and details on the plans for future cables in this region here: http://www.telegeography.com/cu/article.php?article_id=21528&email=html

You can buy a second-hand GPRS wireless modem off E-bay for less than 15 pounds. With a PAYG 3G Sim card straight from the local mobile phone shop you can surf the web for around 10 pence/10 Kilobytes. That isn't cheap compared the basic broadband offerings for land lines, but it is substantially cheaper than SMS.

1 SMS = 10 pence (maximum 150 bytes)

1 block of data = 10 pence (10 Kilobytes)

With SMS, 1 Megabyte = 70,000 pounds

With GPRS, 1 Megabyte = 5 pounds.

These are rates that are going on at the moment. Although sending/receiving an E-mail would probably take up much more data space as even a simple message now seems to come delivered with a whole loading of routing information, spam filter test results, MIME data formatting and HTML formatting.

Many mobile phone operators are now offering flat-rate 3G monthly rates, although there are some opponents.

Oh, and even better: http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_internet/wallpaper/

These maps are neither very useful, nor very pretty. The data visualization methods are a total joke.

Now, this is a map of the internet:

http://www.telegeography.com/products/map_internet/index.php

Too bad it costs an arm and a leg.

I don't think they are creating a new one. They are just joining on one of the planned submarine cable deployments.
Look at this map. It shows all the submarine cables deployed and planned.

Cingular is only the largest carrier by acquisitions. Combined, the GSM carriers in the US have 76M customers (though that includes Cingular's TDMA customers) while the CDMA carriers in the US have 110M customers (though that includes Sprint's iDEN customers, which are soon to be CDMA). The CDMA carriers also have, on average, higher EBIDTA margins, higher average revenue per user, lower churn, and a lower percentage of pre-paid customers than the GSM networks. Doesn't really paint a picture of GSM "winning," does it?

Source

FYI, here is the link to an article on the company's site about this: http://www.telegeography.com/press/releases/2005-0 8-23.php interesting graphic

TeleGeography's own survey concluded that 30% of U.S. broadband subscribers have never heard of VoIP and that only 30% of online households would consider replacing a landline if "automatic" 911 was not part of the service. (June 15th)

Note that the map cited in the Slate article was copyrighted in 2001 -- not exactly a current source of information.

Exactly right. For the doubters that remain, here is a map of some of the undersea fiber that serves the USA west coast.