al_bundling

> It doesn't make sense to compare retail prices to wholesale prices.

It very much does. It gives you a sense of real world marginal costs, a fair assessment of fair market value (fair retail cost = reasonable markup factor * wholesale cost) and a sense of scale.

> If an average coder can't even get bandwidth at $0.001/GB with some serious effort,

If I can, you can. I've even given examples with links to order pages. Not that I recommend FDCservers, mind you.

> then how this this a valid point of comparison for how much bandwidth should cost for the average internet user?

It's a valid point because it tells you how much bandwidth ACTUALLY costs compared to what Comcast says it costs.

> I doubt you can get Level3 or Internap to beat HE prices.

How much money do you have on you? There's a bet I'd like to win.

> Is pumped hydro really 30% more inefficient than even that figure?

The article states 30% cheaper, not 30% more efficient.

> If it's $103/GWh, on the other hand, then we're talking about only ~10% overhead on costs.

The article states $103/kWh, not per GWh. To calculate overhead costs you would need to know life cycle costs which were not disclosed.

It's not so bad. Less than pumped hydro and conventional batteries and at grid scale. Combined those are big pluses as pumped hybro can't be built anywhere and batteries are not suitable for grid scale.

The question is, what are the life cycle costs? If it's on par with pumped hydro, then we are talking.

According to their website it looks quite early stage/small scale/experimental. Anybody know how far from feasible and commercial scale they are?

In the case of the OP, even they are at least 5 to 6 years out according to the founders.

HE is just an example, the other transit providers will match and beat those prices at wholesale scales. For an ISP the wholesale rate is the same as the DC rate.

We are not talking about individuals buying retail bandwidth here.

Allow me to enlighten you:

Price discrimination is ok, if it in addition to providing a premium product also makes the good or product more affordable and available to another class of customers, thus creating a consumer surplus. Classic example: air travel.

Comcast's offering is a sham. It makes broadband more expensive for everyone. This is inherently worse.

Price discrimination is only ok if it increases consumer surplus and you have a choice of providers. Comcast fails on the former and more often than not on the latter.

As I said, ridiculously expensive. Nothing inherently wrong with usage fees, as long as they are fair. That being said, usage fees on a consumer broadband product is a really silly idea if charged at less than 10x wholesale rates as we are talking pennies between no usage and 100% usage.

Not everybody wants to be an ISP. Not enough profit in it to make it worth it for the manager. Lack of backhaul and/or cost/difficulty of connecting to backhaul. Existing long term contracts of tennants. High turnover of tennants. Lack of scale.

> Comcast doesn't need usage-based pricing to raise rates.

The best kind of rate raises are rate raises that don't look like a rate raise but effectively is one.

> Put another way, why is it ok to charge less for a capped speed but it isn't ok to charge less for a capped monthly transfer?

Because the monthly cap is far too low and the usage fees are ridiculously expensive. Combined with the fine print 95% of customers are worse off with a monthly capped transfer.

Like that's going to make a difference or not. Comcast is going to charge you for Netflix bandwidth regardless of it coming from a local cache or not.

> I wish they would just meter the peak hours -- this way more people would set their backups to run overnight

There are a few problems with this. Firstly, very few users are going to cut down peak usage, because it's during primetime that they have the free time and inclination to use the Internet.

Secondly most people don't even know what a GB is. Thirdly, you assume usage-based fees are meant to curb usage rather than drive profits.

> or services would offer a way to cache episodes locally during the night so you can watch them after work.

Since we are basically talking Netflix here, this is never going to fly with the DRM guys.

This is not a technical problem, as you can see, since the desided outcome can be reached, if you are willing to ignore some legal niceties...

It's not like there's much they can do as they aren't Comcast's customers.