This is a common misconception. Bandwidth is actually very, very cheap; if you use your full connection's worth of bandwidth, it costs only a tiny bit more than if you let it sit idle.
You're making some interesting assumptions there.
One of these is that the content you're downloading is close enough to you, that there's no significant cost incurred in getting it to your city.
When that's not the case (eg Australia, with $200 - $300 per Mbit costs on international links) there's one heck of a difference between the cost of an idle ADSL connection and one flatlined with International content.
Routers are cheap. In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, the price per unit bandwidth for a router falls exponentially over time.
However, as you need to handle more and more units of bandwidth, your overall cost keeps rising. Plus, the routers designed for backbone capacity links are specialised and expensive, you don't just buy them from your local Circuit City.
Fortunately, when you install fiber, you can install as much as you want for little extra cost.
once they've run the fibers, adding more bandwidth just means buying more cheap routers.
Aside from your (incorrect) assumption that routers are cheap, you're also assuming the fibre will run from router to router. Whilst this may be applicable on short distances, longer runs require repeaters every x miles. They're not that cheap either, and have to be added, upgraded or replaced to utilise additional fibre or newer technologies (eg higher DWDM rates).
In short, unless the content is in your city, there are significant costs in getting it to you, and generally the further away the content, the higher the cost.
Given the content trend outlined in the original article - that half the content is now coming into the US from offshore sources - the cost of getting that content to you is steadily increasing.
Even in the US, bandwidth is not as cheap as you seem to think it is. It's time the companies stopped trying to hide that, and started passing on some real costs to the end users, just like every other industry does.
I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunatley current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones
In Australia, privately hosted trackers have sprung up around various peering points, which only allows registration and use by people with IPs 'local' to that peering point.
These creates small islands of community hosted content, available at a high speed, without the associated latency and costs of international links.
If the business model used by ISPs makes local traffic 'cheaper' to the end customer, then the high volume customers (those most affected) work out ways of using it.
Slashdot Mirror
... and their site is down. If only they had some IT guys who could do overtime to bring it back up...
Prk
2) Remove the now unneeded SIM slot (what was that about a packed device?)
Keep in mind the SIMs are currently needed for the foreign markets (eg Aus & NZ).
I'm not sure even Apple are big enough to bring out a SIMless handset and force Telcos, internationally, to go SIMless.
prk.
Landmark Legal Decision - Law and Common Sense Align
Today's discussion seemed to question the measurements of that figure.
ie, was that 100,000 pieces of files shared, 100,000 files being shared, 100 files shared 1000 times, etc.
This is a common misconception. Bandwidth is actually very, very cheap; if you use your full connection's worth of bandwidth, it costs only a tiny bit more than if you let it sit idle.
You're making some interesting assumptions there.
One of these is that the content you're downloading is close enough to you, that there's no significant cost incurred in getting it to your city.
When that's not the case (eg Australia, with $200 - $300 per Mbit costs on international links) there's one heck of a difference between the cost of an idle ADSL connection and one flatlined with International content.
Routers are cheap. In fact, thanks to Moore's Law, the price per unit bandwidth for a router falls exponentially over time.
However, as you need to handle more and more units of bandwidth, your overall cost keeps rising. Plus, the routers designed for backbone capacity links are specialised and expensive, you don't just buy them from your local Circuit City.
Fortunately, when you install fiber, you can install as much as you want for little extra cost.
once they've run the fibers, adding more bandwidth just means buying more cheap routers.
Aside from your (incorrect) assumption that routers are cheap, you're also assuming the fibre will run from router to router. Whilst this may be applicable on short distances, longer runs require repeaters every x miles. They're not that cheap either, and have to be added, upgraded or replaced to utilise additional fibre or newer technologies (eg higher DWDM rates).
In short, unless the content is in your city, there are significant costs in getting it to you, and generally the further away the content, the higher the cost.
Given the content trend outlined in the original article - that half the content is now coming into the US from offshore sources - the cost of getting that content to you is steadily increasing.
Even in the US, bandwidth is not as cheap as you seem to think it is. It's time the companies stopped trying to hide that, and started passing on some real costs to the end users, just like every other industry does.
prk
I agree that P2P is holding us back, and unfortunatley current P2P systems aren't "smart" enough to prefer local connections over long distance ones
In Australia, privately hosted trackers have sprung up around various peering points, which only allows registration and use by people with IPs 'local' to that peering point.
These creates small islands of community hosted content, available at a high speed, without the associated latency and costs of international links.
If the business model used by ISPs makes local traffic 'cheaper' to the end customer, then the high volume customers (those most affected) work out ways of using it.
prk.