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The Huffington Post reports
In our Petition for Investigation of Time Warner Cable (TWC) and Comcast, we point out that TWC's High-Speed Internet service has a 97 percent profit margin and a number of people asked how that statistic was derived. Simple. Time Warner Cable provides the information, (with some caveats).
Below is the actual financial information excerpted from the Time Warner Cable, 2013 SEC-filed annual report. (Please note that this same mathematics is also used by Comcast and probably Verizon and AT&T, though they do not explicitly detail their financials in this way.)
Moreover, we need to put this financial information in context to what customers are paying, and more specifically with the Time Warner Cable Triple Play bill that's been featured in previous articles.
[...]
Net Neutrality, Competition, and Fees to Competitors
In the current FCC proceeding about Open Internet, commonly known as "Net Neutrality", one of the issues surrounds what the competitors and content providers, such as Netflix, are paying to connect to the cable networks. On the other side, the 'slow-lane-fast-lane' discussion is all about charging end-user customers more or getting your service slowed down in some way.
To put it bluntly, with a 97 percent profit margin for High-Speed Internet, TWC has given its own services 'priority' favoritism, a sweet-heart deal,--call it what you want--but any other company would never, ever [be allowed to pay just] $1.32 a month to use the TWC networks to offer competitive High-Speed Internet, but this is what it costs Time Warner Cable's ISP, the part of the company offering the Internet and broadband service, to offer end users High-Speed Internet service. Competitors would most likely have to pay about 50 percent or more of the 'retail' average price of $43.92 to offer their service as a competitor.
If customers have been 'defacto' investors, paying an extra $5.00 a month since 2001 under the "Social Contract" to fund upgrades of the cable networks for High-Speed Internet, why shouldn't these networks be open so we can choose who offers us Internet or cable service over these wires?"
(Score: 5, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @03:19PM
Wireline Costs And Caps: A Few Facts (2011) [fastnetnews.com]
Exponential bandwidth growth and cost declines (2012) [networkworld.com]
Not only is wired internet dirt cheap, it is experiencing slower CAGR than mobile [ethernetalliance.org].
Please reply with newer per-gigabyte costs and graphs if you can find it.
(Score: 4, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @03:24PM
The Zettabyte Era - Trends and Analysis [cisco.com]
You can expect traffic growth to slow as streaming becomes saturated and H.265 and other codecs cut video bandwidth by up to 30-50% for existing resolutions. 4K TV/monitor growth is less than expected so far, so 4K streaming and torrents will take years to become mainstream.
(Score: 2, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @06:02PM
Ah, so 4K TVs/monitors grow? So if I buy a small one, how long until it has grown to a full-size living room TV? :-)
(Score: 3, Funny) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @06:49PM
Depends on how often you water it.
(Score: 3, Informative) by Anonymous Coward on Monday February 09 2015, @04:00PM
This guy has informal numbers from about a year ago: http://blog.streamingmedia.com/2014/02/transit-works-costs-important.html [streamingmedia.com]
At the cheapest tier he quotes, 3Gbps, it costs 50 cents for 1Mbps sustained per month which works out to roughly 1TB of data for $1.50.
It seems reasonable that an ISP as large as TWC buys their bulk ip transit in increments at least that big.