Re: S.Korea broadband firm sues Netflix after traffic surge

[Owen DeLong via NANOG <nanog () nanog org>]

> On Oct 20, 2021, at 11:53 , Jared Brown <nanog-isp () mail com> wrote:
>
> Not to be outdone, British Telecom joins the cephalopod games:
>
> “Every Tbps (terabit-per-second) of data consumed over and above current levels costs about £50m,” says Marc Allera, 
> the chief executive of BT’s consumer division. “In the last year alone we’ve seen 4Tbps of extra usage and the cost 
> to keep up with that growth is huge.”
>
> “When the rules were created 25 years ago I don’t think anyone would have envisioned four or five companies would be 
> driving 80% of the traffic on the world’s internet. They aren’t making a contribution to the services they are being 
> carried on; that doesn’t feel right.”
>
> “A lot of the principles of net neutrality are incredibly valuable, we are not trying to stop or marginalise players 
> but there has to be more effective coordination of demand than there is today”
>
> https://www.theguardian.com/business/2021/oct/10/squid-games-success-reopens-debate-over-who-should-pay-for-rising-internet-traffic-netflix
>
>
> For reference British Telecom has about 10 million broadband subscribers, so apparently those £200m capacity upgrades 
> are stinging.

Back of the napkin, unless I got something very wrong, £200M across 10M subscribers is £20 per subscriber as a one-time 
cost.

Spread across a (very rapid) deprecation schedule of 5 years, that amounts to 33 pence per subscriber per month.

Hey, BT, charge your customers an extra 50 pence per month and enjoy pocketing that £81.6M surplus.

> All in all, this raises an interesting question. Is British Telecom running their networks so hot, that just keeping 
> the lights on requires capacity upgrades or are they just looking for freebies?

Whether or not they are running that hot, the math above makes me think that they are being whiney wankers.

Owen