
YouTube’s Bandwidth Bill Is Low - bensummers
http://www.wired.com/epicenter/2009/10/youtube-bandwidth/
======
mrkurt
This would be more accurately stated as "YouTube's marginal bandwidth cost may
be close to 0". They're peering with enough providers that they don't pay for
bandwidth like, say, Wired does. While Wired pays for the amount of data they
send out (or expect to send out), Google mostly pays for the infrastructure,
not the data.

Peering like this isn't all that new. Roughly 80% of our transit goes directly
to our host's peers, which means they're probably not paying anything for that
traffic (though they're charging us for it). We're happy with this because if
it's going through a peer, it's much snappier for those particular users.

~~~
mpk
What you're missing here is that Google has built its own network with large
global reach using dark fiber. Almost everybody will peer with a party like
Google if they pop up at the local exchange.

By doing this Google can skip most of the usual transit bandwidth tax, which
is where most of the money traditionally goes to if you're sending massive
amounts of data to end-users.

~~~
cperciva
_transit bandwidth tax_

What tax? Sure, Google doesn't have to pay for transit while us mere mortals
do -- but that's just because Google provides its own transit.

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jacquesm
The article glosses over the fact that maintaining that infrastructure costs
money as well.

> Its costs for bandwidth are then amortized across the life of its fiber and
> routers.

It's basically the difference between 'renting' and 'buying', the costs can be
(and probably are) significant though.

If you rent some resource you'll be paying bit-by-bit (pun intended), if you
own it outright you pay it all in one big 'bite' .

So, their bandwidth bill is far from 0, it's just under a different heading on
the balance sheet.

~~~
kevinpet
Exactly what I came in here to say. If I said I got free housing, you'd be
quite disappointed to learn that by "free" I meant that I owned a home and
hence don't pay rent.

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hubb
while the subject of the article is interesting, it's a rough read because of
the author's seemingly ignorant suggestion that google abuse net neutrality,
and the several typos. not really typical for wired.

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jonknee
So the actual cost is somewhere between $0 and $1,000,000 per day. tl;dr we
have no idea.

~~~
DarkShikari
From my experiences, if we assume that Youtube's bandwidth costs are similar
to what Akamai charges for an extremely large video site, and their claim of 1
billion videos viewed per day is correct, they're probably paying about $5-10
million per month. Obviously, if their bandwidth is cheaper than Akamai,
adjust those numbers accordingly. And it might be larger if 720p HD being the
default mode sticks (those have 4 times the bitrate of their regular videos).

~~~
mrkurt
The whole point of the article is that they're not really paying for bandwidth
like you would if you were buying from Akamai. When you peer with someone, you
rarely pay by the mb. It's more like a direct crossover connection from your
router to theirs in some peering facility.

~~~
DarkShikari
The reason bandwidth costs money is not because ISPs and Akamai and other CDNs
are greedy, it's because the infrastructure behind it costs money.

Building your own inftrastructure doesn't make bandwidth free, it just
eliminates the cut that the provider normally takes.

Also, Akamai doesn't charge by the megabyte either, they charge by the mega
_bit per second_ , as does most anyone once you start dealing with Facebook or
Youtube-size loads.

~~~
mrkurt
Yes, that's what I meant when I said "mb", perhaps 95th percentile billing
would have been more explicit. And when you start dealing with Facebook or
Youtube sized loads, you generally start peering rather than just buying
transit from various providers.

When you peer, you no longer pay a 95th. You work out a peering deal with some
provider you send a lot of traffic to and effectively connect directly to them
in some shared facility. _Some_ providers will charge you a 95th rate when you
peer, but even then it's vastly cheaper than what you'd be paying for normal
transit.

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wglb
I was wondering what they were going to do with all that dark fiber that they
purchased, and now we can see.

~~~
nkassis
I guess it pays off to hire geniuses eh?

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gustaf
title feels a little misleading.

the best way to not have your cost scale is probably to do what spotify is
doing - make every user into a peer in a bit-torrent network and have them
share the vast majority of the bandwidth consumption

A Glance at Spotify's Peer-to-peer Streaming:
[http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&...](http://www.google.com/url?sa=t&source=web&ct=res&cd=3&ved=0CBEQFjAC&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.ietf.org%2Fmeeting%2F75%2Fp2p-presentations%2Fdocuments%2Fspotify-
gunnar-
kreitz.pdf&ei=fuPYSue3BJTCsQOCwpGyCQ&usg=AFQjCNGSfDf_xcyc6fi2l24khllPSmv2_Q&sig2=3NeObomiQH5tlwp5
--SR-g)

~~~
mrkurt
I dunno if that's the best way. If you're large enough to make your own
infrastructure worthwhile, I suspect that's way more robust than a relatively
complex end user p2p setup.

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radu_floricica
Come to think of it, large scale there could be a sort-of market in bandwith
based on content. Between google and isp, who wants youtube to have bandwith
more? You could say isp take data from youtube and sell it to the final
customer. The only reason they historically get away with charging both the
content provider and the content consumer is the balance of power: any single
content provider is of little value to the isp, but the isp is of great value
to that provider.

Now that google is a large enough force it could very well make money from
offering bandwith, and isps will bid for it because not doing so would cost
_them_ customers.

~~~
Kaizyn
The key here is that Google bought up enough dark fiber to make itself in
effect an ISP. Therefore, it's a negotiation between equals more than it is a
content provider and an ISP. The fact that Google can make its services slower
for users of a particular ISP if they cause too much trouble probably pushes
the balance of power in its favor.

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psyklic
If an ISP hosts content, would analysts also say that they "have no bandwidth
bill"?

This article states that "[Google] has purchased unused fiber optic cable
known as 'dark fiber'. ... Its costs for bandwidth are then amortized across
the life of its fiber and routers." Sounds logical to me -- it doesn't seem
like Google is "getting away" with anything here.

~~~
mrkurt
_If an ISP hosts content, would analysts also say that they "have no bandwidth
bill"?_

Yes, they very well might. The ISPs costs are largely fixed, it doesn't really
cost them much to stream you a movie or whatever.

~~~
gaius
Everything costs nothing while you're using resources that you've already paid
for, is a more accurate way of looking at it. At the point you exhaust those
resources, the cost is the cost of adding more.

It's like the old memory/cpu/whatever is cheap argument. Yes it is, until you
run out. Then you're in trouble.

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kierank
More info:

[http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/200...](http://blog.streamingmedia.com/the_business_of_online_vi/2009/10/youtubes-
bandwidth-bill-is-not-zero-i-expect-more-from-a-wiredcom-story.html)

I'd recommend Dan Rayburn's blog for a real-world perspective on CDNs, video
etc.

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datums
Google has a lot of fiber and plenty dark fiber. But peering is not free
bandwidth. A lot of people peer and depeer ask Cogent and Sprint :). Fiber is
not free, power to routers is not free. But a headline like that will get you
more clicks and use more bandwidth.

~~~
kierank
You can peer quite heavily without a fibre (or any) backbone. Akamai peers
heavily but has no backbone.

Power is a major issue in datacentres here especially ones in large cities. I
also wouldn't be surprised if Google use software routers instead of hardware
beasts that cost as much as a house.

~~~
blasdel
Forget about routers, Google has designed+built their own 10gb ethernet
switches: [http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/11/16/googles-
secret-10gb...](http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/11/16/googles-secret-10gbe-
switch/)

~~~
stse
When I traceroute youtube the last host my ISP owns is actually named
google-10ge.bredband2.net. My ISP peers with google by AS29518 SKYNET-AS to
AS15169 GOOGLE.

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Zarathu
I remember a post on here a while back that suggested that YouTube costs
Google about $1.6 million per day. :D

