The other thread got me to thinking. All hosts have bandwidth limits and you pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. This is a totally serious question, and maybe a dumb one, but I'd like to know.

Why is there a fee for bandwidth? What are the costs associated with bandwidth that limit it's use? It's just serving/transferring files. How are fees related to this? It's almost like paying a toll...but the fees from a toll go to someone...who are the people who own the servers paying for bandwidth?

So it's several questions....but I'm really interested in understanding this.

I'll assume this is a rhetorical question.....

Is that a similar question to the 'why does money not grow on trees' one??? WTF???

Why do you pay a phone / satellite / cable bill? Sure its just transferring data? That surely couldnt cost any money.........

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Its early...excuse the terrible sarcasm!
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Originally posted by gamerhl
Why is there a fee for bandwidth? What are the costs associated with bandwidth that limit it's use? It's just serving/transferring files. How are fees related to this? It's almost like paying a toll...but the fees from a toll go to someone...who are the people who own the servers paying for bandwidth?Hmmm.... Okay, here's a quick lesson.

It's called infrastructure. Someone has to pay for the maintenance and upkeep of the physical system of networks. Fiber optics cost money. Routers cost money. Datacenters, where the equipment is housed, cost money to lease and build. Technicians -- saints though they may be -- charge for their services to keep the voltage flowing. Don't even get me started on the other expenses -- the connectors, the category 5 cable, the electricity, the backup generators, the federal, state, and local taxes for payroll and sales tax... It adds up, hombre.

It ain't all automatic. There are people in there making it all work, even though it may seem like a magical, wonderful utopia with free-flowing data exchange for all. If you want to partake of the services that they provide, you've got to pay.

That is a silly question.
You pay for bandwidth because the hosting campany pays for bandwidth.
For example a leased line 1 Mbit cost's about £15,000/year thats about 300gig per month.
Do that maths!!!!
It cost's alot of money!!!!

Host's that offer unlimited bandwidth go on the asumption that no one is going to use alot. But if they ever did they would cancel there account and quote terms and condidtions.
On an average site 1 gig per month is more than enough.

Thanks
jbuckle

Well, if you plug a network cable into an internet-server, you want the other end of the cable to be plugged into a switch or a router.
And then you'll want the switch or router to be connected to another router. Finally you're server will be connected to someplace outside the building the server is in. This connection to the outside world is most often a cable which runs through the ground. So people have been digging to get the cable in there. That costs money.
And this cable has to run to some other building which connects it to other buildings and networks around the globe (the rest of the internet).
Well, these buildings cost money too, as does the equipment in those buildings.
And you probably want your connection to be up as often as possible, so people have to be monitoring it. These people want to get paid too.

I hear you thinking: but why does this bandwidth cost so much money ? Can't you just put more and more and more servers on that same connection so that more people will pay for that connection ?

No. :) There's a technical limit on the amount of data that can travel through this connection in a given period. So if you put 10 webhosting servers full of customers on a T1 (i think that's 1.54 mbit/s, correct me if i'm wrong), they're gonna be terribly slow. That's why you'd have to get a second connection, which, in turn, is gonna cost money too.


Short story: You can't put more than X busy servers on a line with bandwidth Y. And if you want to connect those X servers to the internet, you'll have to get a second connection. And you'll have to pay the people that the connection runs to, because they have to pay people to put those cables in the ground and they have to pay for all the equipment to interconnect all those connections.

I hope this makes sense :)

Originally posted by gamerhl
The other thread got me to thinking. All hosts have bandwidth limits and you pay for a certain amount of bandwidth. This is a totally serious question, and maybe a dumb one, but I'd like to know.

Why is there a fee for bandwidth? What are the costs associated with bandwidth that limit it's use? It's just serving/transferring files. How are fees related to this? It's almost like paying a toll...but the fees from a toll go to someone...who are the people who own the servers paying for bandwidth?

So it's several questions....but I'm really interested in understanding this.

The simple answer is because bandwidth costs.

Actually, johnny b, he asks a good question. To use your example about my phone bill or cable bill, it really doesn't make sense. Yes, I pay the cable company, but I pay a flat fee every month whether I watch one hour of TV for the month, or have all 3 TV's turned on to different channels 24/7. Local phone service is the same way. I pay the same fee every month whether I make 2 phone calls, or have the handset permanently glued to my ear.

Why, then, do we charge for transfer (bandwidth)? The simple answer is that I charge the customer by the amount of bandwidth they use because I have to pay for it, myself.

So, I guess the next question would be, "why do I have to pay for bandwidth"? In very basic terms, someone has to spend money to build and maintain the big pipelines. But, just like an electricity power grid, you don't just have every computer plug directly into the big pipeline. Instead, smaller companies build smaller pipes that tap off the big pipe & pay a fee to the big pipe people so that the big pipe people can make a buck or two. The smaller pipes, who also want to make a buck or two, might then split up their pipe between a few different NOC's in the area. The NOC splits off their purchases among the hosting companies taking up residence. The hosting companies then split up the bandwidth they purchase among their customers.

Hmm... I've rewritten that paragraph 4 different ways, and it's still confusing. I think I'll stop now.

EDIT: Heh... 4 replies in between when I hit the "reply to" button and when I hit the "submit" button...

Actually, johnny b, he asks a good question. To use your example about my phone bill or cable bill, it really doesn't make sense. Yes, I pay the cable company, but I pay a flat fee every month whether I watch one hour of TV for the month, or have all 3 TV's turned on to different channels 24/7. Local phone service is the same way. I pay the same fee every month whether I make 2 phone calls, or have the handset permanently glued to my ear.


maybe so...but he said it was just serving / transfering files....why pay anything for all of the above when its just serving / transfering data.....

So its a daft question!!

As for the phone service...you dont pay a flat fee every month for international calls? If the internet was only available in your town, you probably only would pay a flat fee :stickout

You're absolutely right about the part about international calls. It's the same with domestic long distance.

However, I do not agree that it is a "daft question". "The Internet" is not an area of knowledge humans are born with an innate understanding of. We all have to learn. And, I would love to see this forum as a place where people who want to learn can ask questions without worrying about people making fun of them.

sorry kmh but a quick go with the search button would have revealed hundreds if not thousands of posts on the subject.....

If it was gamerhl's first post i could understand ;)

Cheers,

Erm, actually there was one time I was trying to solve this question too. Isn't Internet just a "shared" network, set in the infrastructures and let it connect, heavier load just make connection slower, it doesn't make the hardwares more expensive, can't it be charged fixed amount monthly? I was pretty naive.

Until I found out 2 things.
1. The infrastructures/networks do cost A LOT.
2. Some ppl are good at "occupying" bandwidth.

Then I understand everything. :stickout

Originally posted by kmh
...Local phone service is the same way. I pay the same fee every month whether I make 2 phone calls, or have the handset permanently glued to my ear...

Not exactly true. The local telcos take more money from you than you think. Every time you make a long distance call a certain amount is charged to the long distance phone company on the way to the long distance carrier, and then again once it hands off to the destination's local carrier. They offer you free unlimited local calls to encourage everyone to get phone service. If one day everyone stops making long distance calls you can bet unlimited local calling will end faster than you can yell stop.

Also, when you make local calls you are only dialing around INSIDE the local telephone company's lines, so it's costing them very very little. It's like you putting up a web server at my LAN ONLY for the people in the LAN to visit. Costs me very little because I don't have to pay anyone else.

Exactly... The difference between a local call and a long-distance call. Just what I was saying. :)

well, thanks for those who attempted to answer my question. It was a serious question, as I said.

Everyone else, well, I'll be civil about your responses and not say what I'm thinking.

I thought I'd just give a short example...

You have a file on your computer, say a word document. You want to get this document to your cousin who lives across the country. How do you do it?

You could mail it (a rather good bargin at $0.32, as it would cost you a lot more to actually deliver it yourself), but your cousin wants it yesterday. So you email it.

Think of what is required for that document to zip from your computer to his, in 2 seconds flat. Someone had to plan, lay, execute, and maintain the network that made this possible.

Now, what if you wanted to send your one document to 100,000 people all at the same time. Your needs increase in two ways. You will need more bandwidth as now your data is taking up more 'space' at one time (you can't shove an elephant through a garden hose), and the total amount of that data sent is greater (10kb file x 100,000). What you are paying for is the capacity, more or less.

Another example is outbound faxing. If you have a computer, you can set it up with a list of numbers and fax a document to those numbers. The computer will chug away, connecting to one number, sending the fax, disconnecting, connecting to the next number, sending the fax, disconnecting, connecting to the next number.... and so on. While this is fine, it isn't fine if 1,000 of your stores need the document now.

There are places which handle this. You send your document to them and they have the capacity (30,000 outbound lines) and the network systems to send that document to those 1,000 fax machines at the same time.

Just a couple of examples for you, a bit longer than I had intended...

Originally posted by Skeptical

Not exactly true. The local telcos take more money from you than you think. Every time you make a long distance call a certain amount is charged to the long distance phone company on the way to the long distance carrier, and then again once it hands off to the destination's local carrier. They offer you free unlimited local calls to encourage everyone to get phone service. If one day everyone stops making long distance calls you can bet unlimited local calling will end faster than you can yell stop. In fact that's already the case in many places in the US, and the phone companies are fighting for it in others. They used to call it "local measured service," but that came to be as much a bad word as "unlimited" has in the webhosting word... so now it's usually something like "message rate service." In some places it's a fixed rate per call, in some it's a per-minute toll call just like long distance, in some the two plans are combined -- your very close local area is "per call," and more distant areas are "per minute;" but both are still local calls and handled by your local phone provider.

Almost all customers here in New York have this kind of service (if I call my neighbor next door, I pay 10.6 cents). The phone industry in places like Indiana and Ohio have repeatedly tried to change state tariffs to allow this structure over the past several years; the Indiana legislature, for example, passed a moratorium on such plans a few years ago.

Originally posted by JayC
Almost all customers here in New York have this kind of service (if I call my neighbor next door, I pay 10.6 cents). The phone industry in places like Indiana and Ohio have repeatedly tried to change state tariffs to allow this structure over the past several years; the Indiana legislature, for example, passed a moratorium on such plans a few years ago.

What??!?!?! We pay $20/month for local calling plus $20/month for unlimited calling in Canada.... The only other fees we pay to the company is another $20/month for internet and $5/year to be listed in the phone book....

Well, things can always be worse. In my country I have to pay $ 20.- per month just to be allowed to USE a phone.

That $ 20.- gets me a phonenumber and a connection to the network. It does NOT include any free minutes.

So to be able to make and receive calls I have to pay $ 20.- even if I do not even MAKE or receive any calls.

And there is no such thing as free local calls or a fixed rate either :(

In Cali we get charged per minute on local calls as well. What is annoying is that this is competitive and we get telemarketers calling wanting to save me money on my local calling ::blah:: -only $3/mo and I pay less per minute, etc. Really irritating...

Well, the company wants to be able to upkeep its costs and they wouldn't mind a small profit either.