The bandwidth itself? I’m honestly unsure as I don’t know how AWS’s interconnectivity and total bandwidth compares to Arelion. But it’s still the wrong question to ask.
I think it’s “am I getting the value I expect for the price I pay?” If it’s not for you, that’s fine. But for others, it’s worth the cost. To them, they’re paying for more than mere egress bandwidth.
So basically it's good as long as the consumer surplus is greater than zero, regardless of how the consumer surplus stacks up against the producer surplus?
If it's surplus it's not costs. Why did you claim that the high price is to cover the costs if 99.9% of it isn't covering the costs?
If I may take the opposite view: companies should be grateful to get any profit from me at all.
> If it's surplus it's not costs. Why did you claim that the high price is to cover the costs if 99.9% of it isn't covering the costs?
I edited my comment above to explain in more detail what these charges are covering (and it’s not egress bandwidth alone). This has been a fast moving conversation and I’ve tried to add more context, unfortunately after the fact. My bad for posting too quickly.
If you're suggesting they really do have 1000x the costs of companies whose core business is internet, and yet they refuse to contract with those companies to deliver the service (they can still get 990x profit while still leaving 10x for the other company) in a rational market that would be a business-ending level of incompetence.
It's no different than if I'm selling apples for $1000 each. Even if I can find one or two customers willing to pay that, wouldn't I have to be pretty stupid to spend $900 growing each apple incompetently when I could just spend $2 at the grocery store to fulfil those orders?
I’ve done the best I can with limited time and space to explain it here. If you still don’t understand or don’t care to learn how cross-subsidization works and the costs and business model of operating a tier 1 cloud provider and how they differ massively from operating an ISP, I don’t know what to tell you. Getting a job at one of these companies to gain that experience would be eye-opening for you.
It's funny that you say they are shifting costs around when AWS in particular is notorious for not doing that. Every individual thing they provide is metered and profitable.
