I pay £29.99 per month for an unlimited connection. How much does this cost my internet provider? If I max that connection all the time would they lose money?
2006-12-20 00:04:18 · 4 answers · asked by gileswendes 2 in Computers & Internet ➔ Computer Networking
As I understood it a 622Mb backbone is around £125,000 a month. I can, theoretically 'consume' 8Mb all the time (77th of the total) giving a cost to the ISP of nearly £1700 p/m (125000 / 77) Am I missing something?
2006-12-20 01:25:59 · update #1
Pennies, compared to what you're paying.
ISPs pay for a certain speed for their backbone connection, not for the volume of data that flows. If everyone maxed out their individual connections, it wouldn't cost the ISP a penny more than they're already paying.
An ISP might pay £25,000 a month for a 100 Mbps connection. If they have 20,000 customers at £30 per month -- well, you can do the maths yourself.
The major ISPs such as BT would have multiple backbone connections at numerous points of presence with multi-gigabit throughput. Your £30 connection is a drop in the ocean to them -- they make their big money from hosting centers and enterprise customers. ISPs such as BT and AT&T ARE the internet backbone.
The thing that you are missing is that you are not the only customer! And the total number of customers is not limited by their backhaul connection speed. You are NOT getting a dedicated 8 meg connection -- they'd only be able to support about 77 customers on a 622 meg backhaul if that were the case. If you wanted a guaranteed connection, you'd pay several grand per month for it. For your 30 quid, you share bandwidth with hundreds of other customers.
2006-12-20 00:16:50 · answer #1 · answered by Bostonian In MO 7 · 0⤊ 0⤋
You might have a 8 mbps connection between you and your ISP, but beyond that, your traffic waits in line at a router until it can be transmitted. The 8 mbps claims are just hype, and are somewhat dishonest.
I've run a small office on a 1/2 mbps up/down T1, and no one ever complained about the speed. We got an honest 512, and that was sufficient.
2006-12-20 10:37:23 · answer #2 · answered by geek49203 6 · 0⤊ 0⤋
This is a little off topic i suppose, but whatever you are paying its nothing compared to the exorbitant price of bandwidth within South Africa (I believe this to be the most expensive internet in the world). We are paying around $10 for a gigabyte.
The point im getting at, is that the guys who control the backbones set the rate in our country, its discretionary really and probably comes down to a cost analysis on how much it costs to administrate the routers and backbone nodes, marked up by how much they feel they would need to profit from offering the service whilst still remaining competitive.
2006-12-20 09:02:09 · answer #3 · answered by Continuum 2 · 0⤊ 1⤋
I think they pay the same no matter what
2006-12-20 08:07:16 · answer #4 · answered by Anonymous · 0⤊ 0⤋