Archive for April, 2010
Internets!
Earlier today, I was reading this Ars Technica article and found it difficult to relate the figure of 250 GB/$250 to what I knew. So I figured it was time to do some statistics of my own!
First of all, a direct comparison isn’t really possible — I’m on a proper unlimited data plan (well, two of them actually), and nobody has ever called me up to ask me about toning down my usage. Similarly, I live in a nice big city of 2.something million residents and that really does translate to good prices solely because it’s cheaper to run Internets to a lot of people in a small area, than to a small number of people in a large area.
But putting all that aside for now and just focusing on the numbers, let’s see how we can quantify my Internet usage:
Cost
We’ll start with the easiest part, determining the cost per month. I have two ISPs: RDS and iLink. The RDS connection costs me 64 RON/month and the iLink one costs 45 RON/month. Converting (and rounding up) to the nearest US Dollar, we get:
RDS: $21 US/mo
iLink: $15 US/mo
Total: $36 US/mo
Usage in the last month
Looking at my pfSense gateway’s statistics, I don’t actually have numbers for the entire previous month, but I’m pretty close. Here are the graphs I saw (click for full-size, if you want):
RDS:
iLink:
And here are the interesting numbers in plain text:
RDS: 210.11 GB in + 20.83 GB out = 230.94 GB
iLink: 68.96 GB in + 32.57 GB out = 101.52 GB
Total (rounded up): 230 GB in + 54 GB = 284 GB
Which gives us a ratio of 284 GB / $36 US = almost 8 GB/US$.
When we compare this to just over 1 GB/US$, we come to the conclusion that I would’ve ended up paying 8 times more for the same bandwidth usage, were I unfortunate enough to have Frontier Communications as my ISP.
Now, like I said earlier, it’s not really a fair comparison, in that they’re in a small town and I’m not, but still… a ratio of 1/8th the price?
And some fun
Anyway, while we’re looking at this data, let’s have some fun with it. Using the maximum columns from the two graphs above, we can characterize my two Internet connections (with some crappy approximation):
- RDS: Asymmetrical 20 Mbps/3.5 Mbps, for $21/mo.
- iLink: Symmetrical 10/10 Mbps, for $15/mo.
Is that good? Is that bad? I don’t know. All I know is it’s more bandwidth than I absolutely need (and the averages agree), but since I need both connections for redundancy anyway, why not use them both?
