Will video break the Internet?

[Peter7]

http://www.cnn.com/2006/TECH/internet/05/16/net.neutrality.ap/index.html

Some interesting figures here:

As a rough estimate, an always-on, 1 megabit-per-second tap into the Internet backbone in downtown Atlanta, bought wholesale, costs an ISP $10 to $20 a month, according to the research firm TeleGeography Inc.

On the broadband network, the oversubscription means that one megabit-per-second connection to the Internet is enough to serve 40 DSL accounts, each at a maximum speed of 768 kilobits per second, typical for low-end DSL. So the cost of providing data to each DSL is about 25 cents to 50 cents a month per customer.

To illustrate what that would mean, BellSouth Corp.'s chief architect, Henry Kafka, uses the assumption that the cost of providing a month's worth of data to the average user, about 2 gigabytes, costs the company $1. That's a fairly small amount compared to the $25 to $47 a month BellSouth charges for DSL, but then the company has to pay for sales, support, maintenance and a host of other costs.

If that same user were to start downloading five TV-quality movies per month, BellSouth's data cost, not including the cost of maintaining the DSL line, would go up to $4.50 a month. Higher, but perhaps not high enough to break BellSouth's business model.

But if the customer starts watching Internet TV like the average household watches regular TV, 8 hours a day, BellSouth's cost would go up to $112 a month, according to Kafka.

"We don't expect to get to the point where we're charging anyone those kinds of prices for Internet service, but it does reflect the kind of impact that high-quality video could have on the network and business models for providing the Internet," Kafka said.

 

[w1z4rd]

Yeah, now imagine this with out mobile and telkom rates