Hacker News new | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submit login

It's worse than that. If you look at how much bandwidth is required for any-to-any connectivity you can approximate how much it costs by modelling the internet as a full graph. Of course the cost of a full graph internet is n(n-1), with n the number of customers.

The problem is, what happens when you connect a new customer. Well, simple :

1) the income of the ISP increases by some fixed amount

2) the cost of providing this connection increases by n+1 (the number of existing customers)

So here's the catch

np needs to pay for n(n-1)c pipes

Where n is the number of customers on the internet. P is the average income per customer and c is the cost of a pipe that will sustain one customer.

Needless to say, this won't work.




Approximating the Internet to a complete graph with edges of equal cost is absurd, that's not how it operates at all.


True, but people claiming: "I pay for XXX Mbit/s, I want my XXX Mbit/s 100% of time to 100% of the Internet" think/want the Internet to operate like that.




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: