this post was submitted on 16 Oct 2024
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Yes but that isn't changed by the amount of data used. There is no cost to supply per kb supplied, only a cost to maintain the equipment that governs the speed of the connection.
Here's an analog example. If the city you lived in started charging you more for the water to come into your house faster as well as charging you for the amount of water you use. Obviously you should pay for the amount of a finite resource you use but the speed at which you acquired that resource should be limited only by the physics of the water transportation system.
Data on the other hand, is not a finite resource. There is no limit to the amount of data one can acquire given endless time and energy. So the only way to bill for that becomes the speed at which you acquire the data. You pay for the data speed and that funds the infrastructure to supply that speed indefinitely. End of story. The only reason data caps exist is that they want to charge more money for you to use less bandwidth so they can sell that bandwidth to other people. When what should really happen is, they should invest in higher bandwidth capacity and sell that to their customers to return on that investment.
Either supply me infinite speed and bill me for the amount of data used or supply me infinite data and bill me for the bandwidth. Not both.
I'm not arguing against charging based on bandwidth speeds. You're right the total data transfered doesn't really make a difference.
My point is that even just charging per Mbps, internet will always be cheaper within a data center. Just like water utility service is going to be cheaper next to a freshwater river than in the middle of the desert. There's millions of dollars in equipment you're effectively renting to get the internet to your house from the nearest datacenter. Your OVH server in comparison only needs maybe 1 extra network switch installed to get it online, and you're in a WAY bigger pool of customers to split the cost of service to the building.
My point was really that data can't be that exensive even with including transit fees like Cogent and Level3, because I can use TBs of bandwidth every month and OVH doesn't even bother measuring it.
If my home ISP gives me a gigabit link, yes I pay for all the cabling and equipment to carry that traffic. But that's it, I already pay for infrastructure capable of providing me with gigabit connectivity. So why is it that they also want me to pay per the GB?
In Europe they can provide gigabit connectivity for dirt cheap with no caps, they don't even bother with tiered speed plans there, how come my $120+/mo Internet in the US isn't sufficient to cover the bandwidth costs? It's ridiculous, even StarLink doesn't have data caps.
But somehow communities with crappy DSL that can barely do 10 Mbps still have ridiculously low data caps. It's somehow not a problem for most ISPs in the world, except US ISPs, the supposedly richest and most advanced country in the world.