Bandwidth cost versus HDD pricing
The speed of broadband services worldwide is increasing rapidly with the upgrade to fibre-based broadband from technologies like ADSL and cable modems. Fibre subscriptions now comprise 10% of all broadband connections in the OECD regions, and fibre has become the dominant connection technology in South Korea and Japan.
Some of the residential fibre-based broadband offerings in Asia provide speeds as high as 1 Gbps. These services are typically uncapped which means that a significant amount of content can be downloaded per month.
The multitude of available content on the Internet – combined with services like BitTorrent and Limewire which makes sharing and downloading content easy – means that an interesting problem emerged: the cost of storing the content has become a costly affair.
If a user downloads content at a constant speed of 8 Mbps for a full month he will accumulate over 2.5 TB of data during the month. With 1 TB hard disk drives (HDD) retailing for around R 900, the cost for storing this downloaded content can exceed R 2 000 per month.
At a cost of R 900 for a 1 TB HDD, the cost per storage space on the drive is around 88c per GB. In the international broadband market where high speed uncapped broadband connections are commonplace the cost of 1 GB of Internet bandwidth is typically cheaper than the cost of 1 GB of storage space.
In South Africa the situation however looks very different. The cost of ADSL bandwidth in South Africa generally ranges between R 50 per GB and R 70 per GB – many times higher than the cost of HDD based storage space. Storage space is in fact a negligible expense when compared with Internet bandwidth pricing, something which is easy to see when looking at local hosting packages.
The price for bandwidth in South Africa is in fact so high that it is cheaper to purchase a DVD than pirate an uncompressed version of a movie or TV series using ADSL bandwidth. Unsurprisingly South Africans often share content by travelling around with mobile storage solutions in preference of sharing it online.
Bandwidth cost versus storage pricing – comments and views
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