Well, this blog is finally back from a short hiatus.
Internode’s John Lindsay has posted some interesting details on the cost of bandwidth at various parts of the network (from peering and transit to last mile access).
These figures are the first we have seen since PPC1 went online in October. A previous presentation (PDF, 36MB) in June shows a big difference between then and now, with international transit costs (per megabit) falling $100, half the previous cost.
To summarize: Bandwidth costs, megabit per second
| Connection | June 2009 | December 2009 | % change |
| International transit and peering | $200 | $100 | 50% |
| In house hosted traffic (i.e games.on.net) | $20 | $20 | |
| Own DSLAM backhaul | $10 | $10 | |
| Telstra DSL wholesale | $100 | $100 | |
| Optus 3G wholesale | ">$1000" | $3100 |
^ John Lindsay said:
It costs $110 a megabit to get the internet to me because we own the path all the way to the internet
I assume this figure includes the use of their own DSLAM (quoted as $10 per megabit per second in his June presentation). He also said:
But at the same exchange we have Telstra Wholesale ports and a customer connected to them costs us $200 a megabit
The cost of international transit has been subtracted accordingly. If we reverse this method with the previous international transit figure, we get $300, in line with the figure on slide 15 of the June presentation.
I hope these figures also put to rest any argument that one could viably run an ‘uncapped’ (without quota) internet service in the present climate.
edit: I got called on the last point, Internode released a truly ‘unlimited’ ADSL 1.5 plan on December the 8th. At $160 (without the bundle discount) obviously they are betting on heavy use. When we have unlimited plans for $50, that will be the day.