Sick of bandwidth gouging? Cloudflare, The Cloudflare content delivery network (CDN) has teamed up with Microsoft, Google, IBM Cloud, and others to form the Bandwidth Alliance, a group of companies committed to trimming fees for data passing through the CDN. The initiative follows from Cloudflare's experience with Google's CDN Interconnect program, which has led to …
"What you really want to be able to do in a robust ecosystem is make it so someone could use the best of the different clouds without the cost of moving data between them."
Gimme an option to switch cloud providers and transfer my content with ease please:
Said it before:
https://forums.theregister.co.uk/forum/1/2018/07/27/microsoft_vl_changes/#c_3576578
Exactly. Yes, laying fiber is costly, no argument there. But once the fiber is in place it costs next to nothing to have the data flow, yet telecoms are always talking about how expensive everything is to get working.
Not true guys, you're just milking the cow to the fullest. Once your initial investment is recovered, bar any unfortunate backhoe you're sailing in clear seas, money dropping like rain every second.
Besides, the benefits these companies regularly post is proof enough. Comms is a better business than casinos - you're fleecing everyone and it's legal everywhere.
bar any unfortunate backhoe you're sailing in clear seas, money dropping like rain every second.
Sadly not true. So there's up-front costs, like civils to construct ducts, lay fibre, buy/lease land for regen sites or PoPs, negotiate wayleaves etc etc. Then for wet stuff, landing stations, backhaul, licences, marine surveys, cable, cable ships, wet cable stores etc etc. Some of that translates into ongoing costs, ie property rents, space, heat & power, hardware & software licences, operating licences, staff costs for selling & supporting services, legal costs.. And maintenance costs.
For the wet stuff, that can happen when seas aren't clear and one or more cable ships may be needed to find a fault, yoink the cable up, repair it, and replace it. The cable laying and maintenance ships are highly specialised and expensive. Cable owners pay into maintenance funds so ships and crews are available to try and meet the 99.999% SLA's sales sometimes sell customers. Which may involve sailing a long distance in bad weather to sort out. During the .Com crisis, funding those ships got a little challenging and there was a risk that some ship operators may go bust.
But it's not cheap to operate a large network, and it's just Sod's law that as route miles increase, so does the likelihood of outages. And if market forces conspire to create a perception that bandwidth should be cheap (or free), then something has to give.. Which is often support and maintenance activity.
My bosses tend to complain about up-front costs, skimp on quality and testing, then are surprised that maintenance and customer service suck down so much money.
If you assume that you can establish an infrastructure and then get a free ride afterwards forevermore, you definitely should try another business.
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