December 7, 2008 Posted by mitch |
internet |
The title... absurd right? How is it possible for them to use more bandwidth than they pay for? Short answer... its not, but according to this
study, its not only possible its happening.
From another article at
arstechnica criticizing this new "research", they made a rather amusing comparison that I feel explains it perfectly.
Imagine that I proposed to you the following argument. I have (let's pretend) added up all the fuel consumed in the process of getting WidgetCo's widgets from the factory to consumers. There's all the gas burned by the trucks that bring the widgets from the factory to the retail store. And then there's the gas each consumer burns driving to and from the store for widgets. And having added up the costs of all this carbon, I discover that WidgetCo is paying only a tiny fraction of the total cost of the fuel consumed in the process of getting widgets from the factory to the homes of customers. Now suppose I claim that this is evidence of some form of outrageous unfairness—WidgetCo is somehow forcing you to subsidize their shipping costs! (The widgets, by the way, are free.)
If, in fact, I were to make such an argument, you would rapidly conclude that there are really only two possibilities: (1) I am a moron, or (2) I must think that you are if I expect you to find this persuasive.
To put maybe a little simpler... for the amount of traffic the Google sends out... they have to have an internet connection to equal that. And on the receiving end... the end user buys an internet connection thats capable of the speed with which they would like to download at. In short BOTH ends have paid their share of their bandwidth usage. What's really the concern however, is that the people Google buys their bandwidth, and connections from is not the telcos, its from the same providers the Telco's buy theirs from. Otherwise known as the backbone providers, and ultimately this is the problem. They feel that they should get a cut of the money Google is paying to their upstream providers because they're having to build infrastructure to support their users wanting to connect to Google faster and faster. And they're complaining about Google subsidizing? Sounds like they want to be, even in a time of record profits... yeah you heard me. Sad thing is, is the Telco's currently get subsidized by our Government through our Tax money, which is supposed to pay for the continual upgrades required to infrastructure. I'll give you a guess where they're not spending it... In the end, this is ultimately the result of why I was a huge supporter of
Utopia for community based fiber infrastructure.
