BellSouth's Kafka-esque Network Costs

Joseph Laszlo | March 08, 2006, 06:33 PM

My best source for interesting industry news, Broadband Reports, points to a Telephony Online piece where BellSouth's Chief Architect, the splendidly named Henry Kafka (he must be so tired of the jokes, though), supplies data I've been curious about for a long time.

Mr. Kafka says the average residential broadband user consumes about 2GB of data per month, which causes bandwidth costs of about a buck.

50 cents per Gigabyte of usage seems fair to me, though I don't have any comparable data to corroborate or refute...anyone else?

The article uses it in the context of IPTV delivered over the Internet, which will of course drive much higher data consumption. I don't think this necessarily warrants charging content providers, but it does help explain usage caps, either formal or informal, for super-high data users.

If $0.50 really is a fair estimate of per-Gig costs (and that cost will tend to be even higher for ISPs outside N. America), that means that someone who uses 20GB/mo costs $10, and 60GB/mo costs a whopping $30.

So, while I continue to believe that bandwidth caps, if they exist at all, should be made clear and explicit to the consumer, rather than vague and mysterious, this stat does help justify their existence. Makes me wonder why ISPs with caps haven't provided similar data already.