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Of course. But also, such data-center hosting is essentially "wholesale", for customers who are indifferent about location and buying enough to care about slight changes in rates.

Retail, to a particular fixed location, and for households where bandwidth is a tiny part of their overall budget, is naturally going to be 2-10X more expensive.

AWS wholesale transfer out (not subsidized/forgiven to make their service 'sticky') is still $0.12/GB. Comcast's retail price is less than 2X that. No biggie.



Your using AWS's highest prices. AWS also lists is $0.05 per GB to the internet and it get's cheaper if your a large scale customer. Comcast on on the other hand charges an "additional $1.00 for each gigabyte of data used over the 5 GB included in the Flexible-Data Option."


To be fair, in order to get that $0.05/GB rate, you have to be spending more than $11,000/mo on data transfer.


I don't see AWS's $0.05/GB. I see $0.12/GB outbound, for the first 10TB. Google has the same per-GB pricing.

But again, that's bulk wholesale which is often 2-10X cheaper in any industry. Compare like to like.


It's standard tiered pricing. They have a free tier which is subsidized by their next tier @12c per GB but most mid sized clients get into 5c or less scale.

  First 1 GB / month	$0.000 per GB
  Up to 10 TB / month	$0.120 per GB
  Next 40 TB / month	$0.090 per GB
  Next 100 TB / month	$0.070 per GB
  Next 350 TB / month	$0.050 per GB
Above that call them it you can work out even lower prices.


That would be relevant if an important fraction of households used > 10TB. Comcast has reported only ~2% use more than 300GB. So $0.12/GB from centralized, wholesale AWS/Google is the most relevant comparison to Comcast's $0.20/GB retail.


Even accepting that which is a stretch. Your comparing the absolute worst from AWS to Comcast lowest prices. Don't forget unlike AWS Comcast charges for both upload and download and charges the full 10$ for the first bit. Making there actual costs at best 40c per downloaded GB, but more realistically there charging 10$ for people who are going to average 1/2 that bucket split 50/50 upload and down that's 80c /GB on average. And hundreds of thousands of dollars per GB in the worst case Aka 300.001 GB.

Any way you slice it AWS charges rediculusly high bandwidth costs and Comcast still charges way more than that.


I think you don't realize that nobody buys GB of traffic wholesale. They buy bandwidth.


You are technically correct, which is the best kind of correct. Nobody buys GB of traffic wholesale, they buy TB of traffic because a GB is literally a rounding error.

What you probably meant to say was that wholesale bandwith is usually puchased by the Mbps on a 95th percentile billing, although you can alternatively buy by the TB from some providers.


AWS & Google Cloud customers obviously buy by the GB.




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