I said I wouldn't put it as an asset side on the balance sheet. I would put it as a liability - in part because they depreciate faster than a lead brick, but as they also have the highest chance of going wrong, usually for reasons outside my control.
At least with other things which depreciate badly (say for example, computers and servers etc) I can usually control the things that go wrong (redundancy is easier in computers and servers than in a car) and in the case of computers/servers, they are merely a conduit for something which is of value (i.e data), whereas most types of vehicles don't really have a secondary use or component of value. I can transfer data from one computer to another and the data retains its value even if the metal and plastic bits holding said data don't. Can't really do that with a car.
A vehicle should almost certainly be a liability on *your* balance sheet because you don't own yours outright, so you're still on the hook if something happens to it - whether your fault or not.
A car might become an asset if I can use it as collateral against something (which I most likely can't unless the loan seriously under-values the car which wouldn't make financial sense anyway), or if it happens to appreciate in or retain a significant portion of it's value - which for most cars is unlikely.
Mainly because I don't have a calculator handy for working out the finer details of depreciation (a car isn't something I'd put as an asset on a balance sheet anyway), so I'm merely assuming a linear/equal cost per month assuming 10 years of ownership on 2x $20k cars.
Even if I were working with $50k cars the expense I would still not be anywhere near your monthly spend... doing the math in my head, I'd have to be at around $100k per car to get to that level.
Well, first-off I'm not paying anything off over 3 years - no finance costs, no monthly payments - I paid in cash because even though financing is ridiculously cheap in the US (often 3% or less if you're buying domestic), I'm not particularly interested in it, even though certain people will debate whether doing this is a good move economically or not because cars depreciate so badly.
Secondly, being that I am in the US - my cost for fuel is probably about 1/4 what is costs in Aussie (what you pay for a liter I pay for a gallon) - $80 worth of fuel would be about 3.5 tanks full on one of the cars (~35ish gallons) which would work out to about 1,000 miles/1,600km easy - or about a weeks worth (the other car is a bit more thirsty but it's not my daily runabout so only goes to the pump about once a month or so).
As for the others, here are some comparative costs: Registration is about $100/year in this state (or about $8 more if I wanted a custom numberplate) Servicing costs maybe $300 a year per vehicle (although I replaced and upgraded a bunch of parts in 1 of the vehicles so this year at least one of the vehicles will cost a bit more) I just put new tyres on one which was about $400 for a set of Kumhos (the other car had new tyres when I got it so I don't know the exact replacement cost for those yet), and based on my mileage I should get about 2 years out of them. Insurance varies by ZIP code but for my area with my record I'm paying well under $100 a month and getting more coverage than the state requires and I have AAA (AA in Australia/NZ) which is about $120 a year.
So all in all then, I'm looking at about $6k a year, $7k tops and if we include the price of the cars over some arbitrary time period (like 10 years because I'll drive them until they break) that might go as high as $8k. Even with these fairly generous numbers it's still a helluvalot less than $1k a month and I'm doing more than 1,500km a week most weeks.
If you want somewhat accurate stats, fuel buddy tells me that since April 20 when I acquired the latest vehicle, I've spent $1459.64 on fuel, service and tyres; $170 on insurance and AAA, and $207 on vehicle costs ($20k over an assumed lifespan of 120 months + this years registration). I've done 8,146 miles or about 13,000km so far, which works out to a cost of about 22.5 cents per mile or 14.1 cents per KM, which, if I were doing 500km a week would come to $70.46 all inclusive, or still less than $300 a month.
So your healthcare will pay a couple of million to cover you for 24x7 homecare when you are crippled in an accident? or loss of ability to work and provide for your family etc etc? you must have an awesome healthcare system.
That's how most healthcare systems work in developed countries, granted, it's much more difficult to pay a grand total of 1% of income as tax in most countries compared to the US.
Growing up in NZ we had ACC (which the US-Friendly National party is trying to get rid of), when I ended up in Finland we had Sociaali ja terveysministerio (pronounced how it's spelled, because Finnish) and now I'm in the US I have... basically nothing because even with the super-duper-bestest private insurance I'll still get wallet-raped... if I get sick, I'd better be able to get to the airport so I can get on the next flight to Cuba, Panama or Mexico (there's a good chance it'll be cheaper to do that than pay even a "small" deductable).
I notice he is using dollars and kilometers, which unless he's only converting one unit suggests he is either Aussie or Kiwi.
Even with fuel costs as high as they are in those countries compared to a place like the US (about $2.10/liter or US$7.50/gallon last time I was there), I think he is paying way too much - his hire-purchase agreement must be horrendous.
I'm a Kiwi in the US and drive easily 1,000km a week (sometimes in a day) but spend probably half what he does (...for 2 cars, for that matter). I'm not in surburbia, though, just the midwest.
I have 2 cars - one gets about 15-16mpg and has a 20 gallon tank + 3 gallon reserve; while the other gets about 30mpg and has a 10 gallon tank + 0.6 gallon thimble because... at 0.6 gallons I'm not sure why they bothered. But anyway, depending on where I'm going there might be 40 or 50 miles between towns and/or gas stations so it can be important to know whether I should stop and fill up in town A even though I might have 1/4 or 1/8 of a tank; or if I'll make it to town B but probably be on fumes (I also have AAA premier just in case, but so far, so good).
Because I drive between 500 and 1,000 miles a week on average (sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes I do that much in a day) - all up I spend probably $400 a month on gas but I'm brimming my tank 3 times a week or so. Gasbuddy is useful for me simply because it can help me decide where to fill up based on where I'm going and helps me schedule breaks because some interstates are a bit monotonous.
And I use it with a hotspot (actually 2 hotspots - because mobile coverage from any given carrier isn't always perfect) so most of the time, the only wifi it's going to be detecting are my hotspot SSIDs, and as for bluetooth... I have some Bluetooth headphones but that's about it, so whoopdidoo.
I use Gasbuddy in conjunction with Fuel Buddy to track my mileage and other auto-related expenses, but I can see why you'd not really need to bother with such an app if you are only driving 20-50 miles a day and only filling up once a week or less.
Remember this thread started with a conversation about the cost of going to 1gbs. Customers that are having to move from say 30-200mbs to 1gbs+ are going to want more than 1-2mbs dedicated. They are going to want much more than 300gb / month total. Your numbers are way too low for connections that fast. For example residential traffic in the USA is becoming much more steady because of things like Netflix. Netflix needs about 7mbs and that's not including other traffic in the household. And that's all running comfortably on today's 50mbs type connections not for near future when Netflix is using 8x as much and people are pulling down multiple streams.
You're quite right, but even then the increase in usage per subscriber doesn't necessarily correlate with the increase in speed, that is to say, a 50mbps customer going to 100mbps doesn't necessarily double their usage - it may go up by 20-50% or it may even stay near the same as it was before. A much larger jump, say, going from 2 or 4mbps to 100mbps might have that effect though.
We know that home providers right now are underprovisioned. 7pm to 11pm they are only able to deliver 4mbs per home on average, while at times like 4:00 am they can do 18mbs / household and customers express satisfaction. And again that's with many customers buying as little as 10mbs. We know that 2mbs dedicated is less than 1/2 what customers are getting now in the worst markets.
My.2 multiplier I think is fair for good quality peak usage (what the original poster wants). But even if I am to high it is nothing like a.001-.002 as a multiplier. 1000x to one overprovision you just aren't delivering anything like 1gbs of bandwidth.
That's why my numbers are padded to account for 10mbps dedicated which is what I'm working from - that works out to a contention ratio of 100:1 for gigabit connections (a stupid metric, IMO) and comfortably allows 1.5TB per month per subscriber if you're assuming an average of 50% utilization on your trunks with some room for burst/peak.
Individual providers would of course tweak numbers according to their customers habits and availability of capacity to other networks, route costs and so forth, but again, what we're talking about here is large ISPs have cores in several separate areas of the country, so what we're talking about is 130tb/s of core routing and interconnecting bandwidth spread across *all* the major ISPs (let's call it 20tb/s and some change each), divided by region (say 5tb/s per region) which is very doable - if I'm in California, I don't expect my ISP to be trying to deliver say Netflix from their Atlanta core unless said ISP is terrible at routing, I'd expect it to come from San Jose or whereever.
Then you're looking at distributing bandwidth from those large areas to any given point over trunks which get progressively smaller as you get to smaller towns - n*100gb turns to 100gb which becomes n*10gb which becomes a single 10gb link for a small town because obviously a town with 1,000 households doesn't need 100gb or indeed 13tb/s to it - and that 10gb link would contended by say 1,000 households (100:1) which roughly works out.
As for my house. I have about 8 copper lines running to my house. I have a switch box which connect the outlets to up to 3 of those incoming lines. I also have an older system using lead wires inside glass. 2 of those lines were setup for DSL. 0 of them are supported by the phone company today. All of that is abandoned infrastructure.
Alright, but how long were those lines in service?
I would suppose that *IF* the ROI on that wiring was 5 years, it's because back in the day, Ma Bell charged a fortune for everything because they could - telephones were somewhat of a luxury, long distance was expensive as hell and so on and so they basically had huge margins.
However, margins are a lot thinner these days but that doesn't change the
A 5 year ROI is basically unheard of in an infrastructure build - 20-25 is about where it's at, because it's expected to last 50 (or more)
No it isn't. 25 years ago the home internet infrastructure didn't even exist. A few years later it would have been extra capacity at LECs since people were using the cooper phone lines more hours per day. A few years after that it would have been DSL and coax connections capable of 5mbs or less. All of which are totally worthless now. Payoff in 60 months was on the high end, the company needs to make some profit on their infrastructure spend. If people start demanding faster relative speeds that means faster upgrades the spend goes from 60 months down to 36 or so. I'm not picturing 300 months for decades if not a century.
You say that 5 years is about the maximum but here's the thing though: most of the copper in use for the DSL and cable networks is a decade or more old. Sure, it wasn't designed or installed with even an inkling of what was to come, but your twisted pairs are probably nearly as old as your house - which could be 20, 30 or even 50 years.
I can't speak for you, but my house in the US was built in the 1930s, and the internal telephone cabling looks like it was installed in about the 70s or early 80s - and many of the pedastals in the town say either GTE or Verizon on them, so I would speculate that the cables from the CO or pedestal are well over a decade old, possibly nearing 2 decades, and certainly have not been replaced in the last 5. So the ROI timeframe was almost certainly more than 5 years and I would personally be surprised if it were that short, and that is the expensive part of building a network.
The less-expensive bit (the DSLAMS) "only" runs at around $100 per port for VDSL gear (that's Alcatel Lucent pricing, YMMV according to your vendor, FTTH pricing isn't too far off - 100mb modems can be had for about $53 each in quantities as low as 1,000 for stuff with 100mb ports and anywhere from $115 to $350 for gigabit stuff depending on the vendor) - and that amount of money even over 5 years amounts to a fairly trivial amount per month.
Other than that, you'll have some OPEX for powering and maintenance along the way but to make DSL happen it's not really *that* expensive if the lines are already in place. It's all the legal stuff, permitting, digging, labour (and in some countries, bribes) that really run up the bill when building a last-mile network. Or also, in some case, if you're not allowed to trench or build your own poles, paying the monthly or yearly fees for pole access can also end up pretty expensive, but with a high enough penetration rate the amount per end user isn't terribly significant if you're paying $50-100 or more per month.
we don't need to care about the 500 miles in between towns - the middle mile is already done (for the most part)
100 towns * 5000 residential homes each * 2 gb/s *.2 average usage = extra 200k gbs of traffic or 200 pb/sec of traffic. That's a big deal.
Your numbers are a bit off by a couple of orders of magnitude because ISPs tend to contend traffic - by what ratio will vary by provider but very few of them will have 100% of the bandwidth they sell on the middle mile (I'm fairly certain almost none do, I know bengie's ISP in rural where-ever-he-is does as he has mentioned this in many discussions on similar topics, but his ISP is probably the exception which proves the rule).
I know that up until recently (late last year), the local ILEC had 2gb/s for a town of 30,000 people (about 10,000 households) and several surrounding smaller towns (for a total population of maybe 75k) - while offering DSL speeds ranging from 3 to 40mb. Sure, it was not always great during peak hours, but those links have been upgraded to a couple of 10gb/s links (in part because as of about 2 months ago, said ILEC has a pilot gigabit
It's a combination of more than just stupidity and corruption - many other things are at play, in my view.
A 5 year ROI is basically unheard of in an infrastructure build - 20-25 is about where it's at, because it's expected to last 50 (or more). Besides, it's fiber - the infrastructure required to put in 1gig vs 10gig is basically no different - you replace a device on either end when it comes time to upgrade, no extra building required.
One thing we also have to remember (which is often not cited or taken in to account by the naysayers) is that we only really need to concentrate on the last mile when thinking about a build like this - we don't need to care about the 500 miles in between towns - the middle mile is already done (for the most part) and has reasonably healthy competition (unless Zayo keeps buying everyone, then that might disappear), so in the vast majority of cases there's probably already fiber that can easily supply n*10gig or better to a CO/fiber hut/cabinet/etc.
Population density on a nationwide scale is a BS argument and personally I've never found a good argument other than FUD from incumbents and lobbyists as to why *any* built-up area of nearly any size can't have reasonably priced 100-meg or even gigabit Internet if they'd just build that last mile fiber.
Hell, why not start in smaller towns? No doubt there would be fewer issues with building and permitting, not to mention less resistance than there is in a place like NYC (landlords, city council etc). These are often the towns [incumbent] forgot, and by the time they realize, it'll be too late for them to do anything.
By comparison, NZ's fiber build is has a CPPP of about US$2k - the cities are generally low density and the entire thing is on a fault-line so in many respects they face some similar problems to the US, except on a smaller scale (fraction of the size, fraction of the population). More to the point, you have towns even with populations under 1,000 being wired with fiber. Last I checked, some parts of the build are even ahead of schedule and at the end of last year they had a competition to find the town most wanting of gigabit service - and the town that won got it along with the privilege of saying first in the southern hemisphere and so on. No additional build was required to jump from what started out as a 100mbit/s service to reach a 1gbit/s service over and above what was already being put in.
So what's different between us and the US? We as a nation are generally enthusiastic about fiber and most of the country is all for it, in part because it was sold to us as an investment in the future - to beyond 2020. Unlike here where the concern is for this year and next, at best. Which is probably why Frontier expects nearly $300 for gigabit service which allegedly became available where I am just a couple of months ago (though I've never seen a truck-roll for it, I had been waiting for it to be announced for nearly 2 years already, as the deal was struck in Q3 2013). FWIW, they only wanted about $150 for 100mb service - which is 2.5x more expensive than the cableco and about 1/3 what I can get a 100mb dedicated fiber circuit (complete with 4-hour SLA) for.
That doesn't excuse poor access in places like NYC, LA, Seattle, Chicago (you name it) - the conditions in those localities are similar enough to places like HK, Singapore or Tokyo that there's not a sufficiently significant difference in the actual technical ability or financial outlay for companies (or municipalities) to install properly high speed Internet and charge what users pay in a place like HK.
Yeah. Okay. And how many companies are sitting on vast blocks that are only partially tapped?
Almost every university, for starters... Several of them that I know have/16s even though they only need maybe a/19 - or, arguably, even just a/23 or/24... because does every single machine on their network need a public IP? Not likely.
The backbone is less of a problem than the last mile.
The backbone situation is reasonably healthy and competitive in the US (although, at some point they might have to step in and stop Zayo from buying everybody else out).
The last mile... well, that dictates who you can get based on where you live. So I'd say: open and regulated last mile, any retail ISP can offer their service to any subscriber on any last mile infrastructure they like. I may be biased but I like how New Zealand's model has become over the last few years.
The amount of money it costs to add more capacity at a peering exchange or carrier hotel is laughingly negligible. Even more so when compared to profit margins or total costs for CAPEX and OPEX.
It's a terrible excuse.
As far as AT&T "throttling" GTT because GTT doesn't pay them... well, that's one of the things that's not supposed to be a thing now, isn't it? Besides which, what does AT&T expect when probably 98% of their services are asymmetrical? (A technology problem, obviously, but their policy needs to reflect that).
There are only a small number of ISPs in the US offering symmetrical connections to all or most of their customers.
Buffets set a time limit on the table (usually 90 minutes or so, else people actually come in there and can sit all day).
I can't speak for other providers, but in our case while we never used "Unlimited", we recently changed our wording from "flat-rate" to "all you can eat" to make explaining the policies easier. I always felt that "Flat Rate" was talking about flat-rate pricing rather than usage, but we changed it to "All You Can Eat" because it relates more directly to usage - in the specs for the plan we make a comparison to being "like a buffet restaurant, but you can't feed the whole neighbourhood" or something. Granted, this is for wired service, not wireless, and I can quite understand the need for some limitation on wireless services.
The same paragraph also mentions that we expect usage of between 1 and 2 TB on that particular plan (but that the limits are still soft, as they always were - chances are if we ever got anyone using 77TB of data like that guy on Verizon FiOS did we might not be too happy about it though). At the same time 2TB equates to about 6mbit/s 24x7 and is - for most households - plenty and for most intents and purposes "practically unlimited", even on a 100mbit/s connection (and as bandwidth prices fall, that threshold will undoubtedly increase).
Even so, most people buy a usage-based plan which offers data topups at fairly reasonable prices.
What you mean the "exclusive" franchising that's already illegal? (Franchises are non-exclusive these days, but there are other - mostly artificial - barriers)
$7k for 500mbit/s? That sounds a bit expensive, even in a rural-ish area. I can get over 1 gbps (with SLA) for a little less than that in a town with under 30k people in the midwest.
Your ISP is probably getting ripped off possibly by a term contract that doesn't account for automatic bandwidth upgrades for the same amount of money.
IMHO this is the wrong type of thinking. Setting minimums doesn't give anything to aspire to, it doesn't give anyone any incentive to push the technology to what it can do.
Instead providers focus on providing "good enough to meet the minimum".
This is mostly an America-centric problem, unless you're flying a budget airline, in which case you're probably paying 1/4 to 1/10 the price of the ticket on a normal airline, so extra baggage fees are (in some way) justified.
If I fly Jetstar (a budget airline) Auckland to Singapore for $99 I expect to pay extra for baggage. If I fly Air New Zealand or Singapore (full service airlines) from Auckland to Singapore, I don't expect to pay extra for baggage.
But in the US, it doesn't matter who I fly with, I'm going to be charged for baggage, and that is annoying.
Perhaps if she took it a step further and superimposed an image big rubber stamp saying "void" or "this guy sucks" over his comment, she would be "appropriating" just as much as he is, as demonstrably proven by the past court case(s) against him therefore citing his previous cases as defense, he absolutely can't sue her.
But then what of the original works? If I were her I probably would be litigating because unlike his previous case where he modified (somewhat) the original image, he hasn't really done dick to "transform" anything except add his comment and print it out.
Slashdot Mirror
I said I wouldn't put it as an asset side on the balance sheet. I would put it as a liability - in part because they depreciate faster than a lead brick, but as they also have the highest chance of going wrong, usually for reasons outside my control.
At least with other things which depreciate badly (say for example, computers and servers etc) I can usually control the things that go wrong (redundancy is easier in computers and servers than in a car) and in the case of computers/servers, they are merely a conduit for something which is of value (i.e data), whereas most types of vehicles don't really have a secondary use or component of value. I can transfer data from one computer to another and the data retains its value even if the metal and plastic bits holding said data don't. Can't really do that with a car.
A vehicle should almost certainly be a liability on *your* balance sheet because you don't own yours outright, so you're still on the hook if something happens to it - whether your fault or not.
A car might become an asset if I can use it as collateral against something (which I most likely can't unless the loan seriously under-values the car which wouldn't make financial sense anyway), or if it happens to appreciate in or retain a significant portion of it's value - which for most cars is unlikely.
Mainly because I don't have a calculator handy for working out the finer details of depreciation (a car isn't something I'd put as an asset on a balance sheet anyway), so I'm merely assuming a linear/equal cost per month assuming 10 years of ownership on 2x $20k cars.
Even if I were working with $50k cars the expense I would still not be anywhere near your monthly spend... doing the math in my head, I'd have to be at around $100k per car to get to that level.
Well, first-off I'm not paying anything off over 3 years - no finance costs, no monthly payments - I paid in cash because even though financing is ridiculously cheap in the US (often 3% or less if you're buying domestic), I'm not particularly interested in it, even though certain people will debate whether doing this is a good move economically or not because cars depreciate so badly.
Secondly, being that I am in the US - my cost for fuel is probably about 1/4 what is costs in Aussie (what you pay for a liter I pay for a gallon) - $80 worth of fuel would be about 3.5 tanks full on one of the cars (~35ish gallons) which would work out to about 1,000 miles/1,600km easy - or about a weeks worth (the other car is a bit more thirsty but it's not my daily runabout so only goes to the pump about once a month or so).
As for the others, here are some comparative costs:
Registration is about $100/year in this state (or about $8 more if I wanted a custom numberplate)
Servicing costs maybe $300 a year per vehicle (although I replaced and upgraded a bunch of parts in 1 of the vehicles so this year at least one of the vehicles will cost a bit more)
I just put new tyres on one which was about $400 for a set of Kumhos (the other car had new tyres when I got it so I don't know the exact replacement cost for those yet), and based on my mileage I should get about 2 years out of them.
Insurance varies by ZIP code but for my area with my record I'm paying well under $100 a month and getting more coverage than the state requires and I have AAA (AA in Australia/NZ) which is about $120 a year.
So all in all then, I'm looking at about $6k a year, $7k tops and if we include the price of the cars over some arbitrary time period (like 10 years because I'll drive them until they break) that might go as high as $8k. Even with these fairly generous numbers it's still a helluvalot less than $1k a month and I'm doing more than 1,500km a week most weeks.
If you want somewhat accurate stats, fuel buddy tells me that since April 20 when I acquired the latest vehicle, I've spent $1459.64 on fuel, service and tyres; $170 on insurance and AAA, and $207 on vehicle costs ($20k over an assumed lifespan of 120 months + this years registration). I've done 8,146 miles or about 13,000km so far, which works out to a cost of about 22.5 cents per mile or 14.1 cents per KM, which, if I were doing 500km a week would come to $70.46 all inclusive, or still less than $300 a month.
So your healthcare will pay a couple of million to cover you for 24x7 homecare when you are crippled in an accident? or loss of ability to work and provide for your family etc etc? you must have an awesome healthcare system.
That's how most healthcare systems work in developed countries, granted, it's much more difficult to pay a grand total of 1% of income as tax in most countries compared to the US.
Growing up in NZ we had ACC (which the US-Friendly National party is trying to get rid of), when I ended up in Finland we had Sociaali ja terveysministerio (pronounced how it's spelled, because Finnish) and now I'm in the US I have... basically nothing because even with the super-duper-bestest private insurance I'll still get wallet-raped... if I get sick, I'd better be able to get to the airport so I can get on the next flight to Cuba, Panama or Mexico (there's a good chance it'll be cheaper to do that than pay even a "small" deductable).
People already run around naked in public in Finland. Even in Winter :D
For the most part, they pretty much don't. Crime is not very high in Finland (I lived there for about 4 years, mostly in HKI)
I notice he is using dollars and kilometers, which unless he's only converting one unit suggests he is either Aussie or Kiwi.
Even with fuel costs as high as they are in those countries compared to a place like the US (about $2.10/liter or US$7.50/gallon last time I was there), I think he is paying way too much - his hire-purchase agreement must be horrendous.
I'm a Kiwi in the US and drive easily 1,000km a week (sometimes in a day) but spend probably half what he does (...for 2 cars, for that matter). I'm not in surburbia, though, just the midwest.
I have 2 cars - one gets about 15-16mpg and has a 20 gallon tank + 3 gallon reserve; while the other gets about 30mpg and has a 10 gallon tank + 0.6 gallon thimble because... at 0.6 gallons I'm not sure why they bothered. But anyway, depending on where I'm going there might be 40 or 50 miles between towns and/or gas stations so it can be important to know whether I should stop and fill up in town A even though I might have 1/4 or 1/8 of a tank; or if I'll make it to town B but probably be on fumes (I also have AAA premier just in case, but so far, so good).
Because I drive between 500 and 1,000 miles a week on average (sometimes more, sometimes less, sometimes I do that much in a day) - all up I spend probably $400 a month on gas but I'm brimming my tank 3 times a week or so. Gasbuddy is useful for me simply because it can help me decide where to fill up based on where I'm going and helps me schedule breaks because some interstates are a bit monotonous.
And I use it with a hotspot (actually 2 hotspots - because mobile coverage from any given carrier isn't always perfect) so most of the time, the only wifi it's going to be detecting are my hotspot SSIDs, and as for bluetooth... I have some Bluetooth headphones but that's about it, so whoopdidoo.
I use Gasbuddy in conjunction with Fuel Buddy to track my mileage and other auto-related expenses, but I can see why you'd not really need to bother with such an app if you are only driving 20-50 miles a day and only filling up once a week or less.
What I meant to say in the last paragraph was:
that $2,000 becomes $500 or $300 or whatever the case may be **per household**
Remember this thread started with a conversation about the cost of going to 1gbs. Customers that are having to move from say 30-200mbs to 1gbs+ are going to want more than 1-2mbs dedicated. They are going to want much more than 300gb / month total. Your numbers are way too low for connections that fast. For example residential traffic in the USA is becoming much more steady because of things like Netflix. Netflix needs about 7mbs and that's not including other traffic in the household. And that's all running comfortably on today's 50mbs type connections not for near future when Netflix is using 8x as much and people are pulling down multiple streams.
You're quite right, but even then the increase in usage per subscriber doesn't necessarily correlate with the increase in speed, that is to say, a 50mbps customer going to 100mbps doesn't necessarily double their usage - it may go up by 20-50% or it may even stay near the same as it was before. A much larger jump, say, going from 2 or 4mbps to 100mbps might have that effect though.
We know that home providers right now are underprovisioned. 7pm to 11pm they are only able to deliver 4mbs per home on average, while at times like 4:00 am they can do 18mbs / household and customers express satisfaction. And again that's with many customers buying as little as 10mbs. We know that 2mbs dedicated is less than 1/2 what customers are getting now in the worst markets.
My .2 multiplier I think is fair for good quality peak usage (what the original poster wants). But even if I am to high it is nothing like a .001-.002 as a multiplier. 1000x to one overprovision you just aren't delivering anything like 1gbs of bandwidth.
That's why my numbers are padded to account for 10mbps dedicated which is what I'm working from - that works out to a contention ratio of 100:1 for gigabit connections (a stupid metric, IMO) and comfortably allows 1.5TB per month per subscriber if you're assuming an average of 50% utilization on your trunks with some room for burst/peak.
Individual providers would of course tweak numbers according to their customers habits and availability of capacity to other networks, route costs and so forth, but again, what we're talking about here is large ISPs have cores in several separate areas of the country, so what we're talking about is 130tb/s of core routing and interconnecting bandwidth spread across *all* the major ISPs (let's call it 20tb/s and some change each), divided by region (say 5tb/s per region) which is very doable - if I'm in California, I don't expect my ISP to be trying to deliver say Netflix from their Atlanta core unless said ISP is terrible at routing, I'd expect it to come from San Jose or whereever.
Then you're looking at distributing bandwidth from those large areas to any given point over trunks which get progressively smaller as you get to smaller towns - n*100gb turns to 100gb which becomes n*10gb which becomes a single 10gb link for a small town because obviously a town with 1,000 households doesn't need 100gb or indeed 13tb/s to it - and that 10gb link would contended by say 1,000 households (100:1) which roughly works out.
As for my house. I have about 8 copper lines running to my house. I have a switch box which connect the outlets to up to 3 of those incoming lines. I also have an older system using lead wires inside glass. 2 of those lines were setup for DSL. 0 of them are supported by the phone company today. All of that is abandoned infrastructure.
Alright, but how long were those lines in service?
I would suppose that *IF* the ROI on that wiring was 5 years, it's because back in the day, Ma Bell charged a fortune for everything because they could - telephones were somewhat of a luxury, long distance was expensive as hell and so on and so they basically had huge margins.
However, margins are a lot thinner these days but that doesn't change the
No it isn't. 25 years ago the home internet infrastructure didn't even exist. A few years later it would have been extra capacity at LECs since people were using the cooper phone lines more hours per day. A few years after that it would have been DSL and coax connections capable of 5mbs or less. All of which are totally worthless now. Payoff in 60 months was on the high end, the company needs to make some profit on their infrastructure spend. If people start demanding faster relative speeds that means faster upgrades the spend goes from 60 months down to 36 or so. I'm not picturing 300 months for decades if not a century.
You say that 5 years is about the maximum but here's the thing though: most of the copper in use for the DSL and cable networks is a decade or more old. Sure, it wasn't designed or installed with even an inkling of what was to come, but your twisted pairs are probably nearly as old as your house - which could be 20, 30 or even 50 years.
I can't speak for you, but my house in the US was built in the 1930s, and the internal telephone cabling looks like it was installed in about the 70s or early 80s - and many of the pedastals in the town say either GTE or Verizon on them, so I would speculate that the cables from the CO or pedestal are well over a decade old, possibly nearing 2 decades, and certainly have not been replaced in the last 5. So the ROI timeframe was almost certainly more than 5 years and I would personally be surprised if it were that short, and that is the expensive part of building a network.
The less-expensive bit (the DSLAMS) "only" runs at around $100 per port for VDSL gear (that's Alcatel Lucent pricing, YMMV according to your vendor, FTTH pricing isn't too far off - 100mb modems can be had for about $53 each in quantities as low as 1,000 for stuff with 100mb ports and anywhere from $115 to $350 for gigabit stuff depending on the vendor) - and that amount of money even over 5 years amounts to a fairly trivial amount per month.
Other than that, you'll have some OPEX for powering and maintenance along the way but to make DSL happen it's not really *that* expensive if the lines are already in place. It's all the legal stuff, permitting, digging, labour (and in some countries, bribes) that really run up the bill when building a last-mile network. Or also, in some case, if you're not allowed to trench or build your own poles, paying the monthly or yearly fees for pole access can also end up pretty expensive, but with a high enough penetration rate the amount per end user isn't terribly significant if you're paying $50-100 or more per month.
100 towns * 5000 residential homes each * 2 gb/s * .2 average usage = extra 200k gbs of traffic or 200 pb/sec of traffic. That's a big deal.
Your numbers are a bit off by a couple of orders of magnitude because ISPs tend to contend traffic - by what ratio will vary by provider but very few of them will have 100% of the bandwidth they sell on the middle mile (I'm fairly certain almost none do, I know bengie's ISP in rural where-ever-he-is does as he has mentioned this in many discussions on similar topics, but his ISP is probably the exception which proves the rule).
I know that up until recently (late last year), the local ILEC had 2gb/s for a town of 30,000 people (about 10,000 households) and several surrounding smaller towns (for a total population of maybe 75k) - while offering DSL speeds ranging from 3 to 40mb. Sure, it was not always great during peak hours, but those links have been upgraded to a couple of 10gb/s links (in part because as of about 2 months ago, said ILEC has a pilot gigabit
It's a combination of more than just stupidity and corruption - many other things are at play, in my view.
A 5 year ROI is basically unheard of in an infrastructure build - 20-25 is about where it's at, because it's expected to last 50 (or more). Besides, it's fiber - the infrastructure required to put in 1gig vs 10gig is basically no different - you replace a device on either end when it comes time to upgrade, no extra building required.
One thing we also have to remember (which is often not cited or taken in to account by the naysayers) is that we only really need to concentrate on the last mile when thinking about a build like this - we don't need to care about the 500 miles in between towns - the middle mile is already done (for the most part) and has reasonably healthy competition (unless Zayo keeps buying everyone, then that might disappear), so in the vast majority of cases there's probably already fiber that can easily supply n*10gig or better to a CO/fiber hut/cabinet/etc.
Population density on a nationwide scale is a BS argument and personally I've never found a good argument other than FUD from incumbents and lobbyists as to why *any* built-up area of nearly any size can't have reasonably priced 100-meg or even gigabit Internet if they'd just build that last mile fiber.
Hell, why not start in smaller towns? No doubt there would be fewer issues with building and permitting, not to mention less resistance than there is in a place like NYC (landlords, city council etc). These are often the towns [incumbent] forgot, and by the time they realize, it'll be too late for them to do anything.
By comparison, NZ's fiber build is has a CPPP of about US$2k - the cities are generally low density and the entire thing is on a fault-line so in many respects they face some similar problems to the US, except on a smaller scale (fraction of the size, fraction of the population). More to the point, you have towns even with populations under 1,000 being wired with fiber. Last I checked, some parts of the build are even ahead of schedule and at the end of last year they had a competition to find the town most wanting of gigabit service - and the town that won got it along with the privilege of saying first in the southern hemisphere and so on. No additional build was required to jump from what started out as a 100mbit/s service to reach a 1gbit/s service over and above what was already being put in.
So what's different between us and the US? We as a nation are generally enthusiastic about fiber and most of the country is all for it, in part because it was sold to us as an investment in the future - to beyond 2020. Unlike here where the concern is for this year and next, at best. Which is probably why Frontier expects nearly $300 for gigabit service which allegedly became available where I am just a couple of months ago (though I've never seen a truck-roll for it, I had been waiting for it to be announced for nearly 2 years already, as the deal was struck in Q3 2013). FWIW, they only wanted about $150 for 100mb service - which is 2.5x more expensive than the cableco and about 1/3 what I can get a 100mb dedicated fiber circuit (complete with 4-hour SLA) for.
That doesn't excuse poor access in places like NYC, LA, Seattle, Chicago (you name it) - the conditions in those localities are similar enough to places like HK, Singapore or Tokyo that there's not a sufficiently significant difference in the actual technical ability or financial outlay for companies (or municipalities) to install properly high speed Internet and charge what users pay in a place like HK.
Yeah. Okay. And how many companies are sitting on vast blocks that are only partially tapped?
Almost every university, for starters... Several of them that I know have /16s even though they only need maybe a /19 - or, arguably, even just a /23 or /24... because does every single machine on their network need a public IP? Not likely.
The backbone is less of a problem than the last mile.
The backbone situation is reasonably healthy and competitive in the US (although, at some point they might have to step in and stop Zayo from buying everybody else out).
The last mile... well, that dictates who you can get based on where you live. So I'd say: open and regulated last mile, any retail ISP can offer their service to any subscriber on any last mile infrastructure they like. I may be biased but I like how New Zealand's model has become over the last few years.
The amount of money it costs to add more capacity at a peering exchange or carrier hotel is laughingly negligible. Even more so when compared to profit margins or total costs for CAPEX and OPEX.
It's a terrible excuse.
As far as AT&T "throttling" GTT because GTT doesn't pay them... well, that's one of the things that's not supposed to be a thing now, isn't it? Besides which, what does AT&T expect when probably 98% of their services are asymmetrical? (A technology problem, obviously, but their policy needs to reflect that).
There are only a small number of ISPs in the US offering symmetrical connections to all or most of their customers.
That sounds more like it... although Newroads themselves are probably getting reamed too, based on their upstream.
Buffets set a time limit on the table (usually 90 minutes or so, else people actually come in there and can sit all day).
I can't speak for other providers, but in our case while we never used "Unlimited", we recently changed our wording from "flat-rate" to "all you can eat" to make explaining the policies easier. I always felt that "Flat Rate" was talking about flat-rate pricing rather than usage, but we changed it to "All You Can Eat" because it relates more directly to usage - in the specs for the plan we make a comparison to being "like a buffet restaurant, but you can't feed the whole neighbourhood" or something. Granted, this is for wired service, not wireless, and I can quite understand the need for some limitation on wireless services.
The same paragraph also mentions that we expect usage of between 1 and 2 TB on that particular plan (but that the limits are still soft, as they always were - chances are if we ever got anyone using 77TB of data like that guy on Verizon FiOS did we might not be too happy about it though). At the same time 2TB equates to about 6mbit/s 24x7 and is - for most households - plenty and for most intents and purposes "practically unlimited", even on a 100mbit/s connection (and as bandwidth prices fall, that threshold will undoubtedly increase).
Even so, most people buy a usage-based plan which offers data topups at fairly reasonable prices.
What you mean the "exclusive" franchising that's already illegal? (Franchises are non-exclusive these days, but there are other - mostly artificial - barriers)
2-3gbps? Dream on.
4G was *supposed* to be 1gbit/s and average speeds are 20-40mbit/s if you're lucky.
Using similar math, I'd expect maybe 1gbit/s by the time marketing gets done with it and 500mbit/s in real life.
$7k for 500mbit/s? That sounds a bit expensive, even in a rural-ish area. I can get over 1 gbps (with SLA) for a little less than that in a town with under 30k people in the midwest.
Your ISP is probably getting ripped off possibly by a term contract that doesn't account for automatic bandwidth upgrades for the same amount of money.
IMHO this is the wrong type of thinking. Setting minimums doesn't give anything to aspire to, it doesn't give anyone any incentive to push the technology to what it can do.
Instead providers focus on providing "good enough to meet the minimum".
And this doesn't just apply to the US.
This is mostly an America-centric problem, unless you're flying a budget airline, in which case you're probably paying 1/4 to 1/10 the price of the ticket on a normal airline, so extra baggage fees are (in some way) justified.
If I fly Jetstar (a budget airline) Auckland to Singapore for $99 I expect to pay extra for baggage. If I fly Air New Zealand or Singapore (full service airlines) from Auckland to Singapore, I don't expect to pay extra for baggage.
But in the US, it doesn't matter who I fly with, I'm going to be charged for baggage, and that is annoying.
Perhaps if she took it a step further and superimposed an image big rubber stamp saying "void" or "this guy sucks" over his comment, she would be "appropriating" just as much as he is, as demonstrably proven by the past court case(s) against him therefore citing his previous cases as defense, he absolutely can't sue her.
But then what of the original works? If I were her I probably would be litigating because unlike his previous case where he modified (somewhat) the original image, he hasn't really done dick to "transform" anything except add his comment and print it out.
But that's just my opinion.
damnit ./ stop stripping stuff.
(bad texas accent) But nothin'... quit stutterin', boy, people'll think yewr stoopid (/bad texas accent)