2mb for less than €30 allegedly

boyan

IrishMike wrote:

i downloaded 340+ gigs over the month of november ricardo
all depends on what you want your connection 4 i guess

If you downloaded for a whole month at 1 Mbps _flat_ that would be roughly 325GB. 1Mbps flat would cost your ISP at least 100 EUR. In case your downloading speed is not exactly flat, but jumps to 4 Mbps occasionally, that would cost them at least 200 EUR. This is only costs for buying transit in the UK and/or USA and carrying it over international links to Ireland. If you are paying less than that, your ISP is subsidizing the service.

Now, if I was buying service from the same ISP as you are and I was paying the same price for less usage, I'd really like to ask that ISP if they can put me on a caped service for less. If they have done their math correctly they should be able to do it, only that they'll have to raise the price you are paying, because they would not have cash to pay for your service.

In order to survive financially ISPs need to deal with this issue. There are two ways this can be done. One: Bandwidth oversubscription or contention ratios - ISP buys 100 Mbps flat and sells it as 1 Mbps to 4800 users. Users compete for the bandwidth in a fair fashion. Two: traffic caps - ISP buys bandwidth based on usage patterns so that it can deliver full rate service to all customers even at peak times, users are asked to pay for their usage above a predefined monthly cap. Some ISPs would impose both restrictions.
It seems Magnet is going for traffic caps instead of contention ratios. This means that you will be able to get close to 250 KB/s from your 2 Mbps service from Magnet at any time of the day you wish, any day. This also means that Joe Average will not pay for the unusually high usage of his neighbor's internet connection. If the service offering is implemented properly (which I don't doubt) his neighbor will be able to buy a service that suits him best. He'll have to pay a higer price than Joe though.

I happen to know something about Magnet. The network they are building allows them to deliver 100Mbps of symentrical bandwidth into each connected house. They use that for TV, Voice and Internet services. The last mile bandwidth and backhaul from the PoPs is capable of filling that pipe up, if the need for that appears. Of course they have costs that they need to cover e.g. International links, transit, sat equipment, content licenses, voice links, servers, software, salaries, office space, links around the place. Everything has a cost associated with it.

I would consider 2 Mbps, 12 GB numbers preliminary at this stage.

Cheers,
Boyan

johncorleone

Finally a sensible post on this forum.