[dotwaffle]

> An extra 131 GB of bandwidth per download would have cost Steam several million dollars over the last two years

Nah, not even close. Let's guess and say there were about 15 million copies sold. 15M * 131GB is about 2M TB (2000 PB / 2 EB). At 30% mean utilisation, a 100Gb/s port will do 10 PB in a month, and at most IXPs that costs $2000-$3000/month. That makes it about $400k in bandwidth charges (I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit), and you could quite easily build a server that would push 100Gb/s of static objects for under $10k a pop.

It would surprise me if the total additional costs were over $1M, considering they already have their own CDN setup. One of the big cloud vendors would charge $100M just for the bandwidth, let alone the infrastructure to serve it, based on some quick calculation I've done (probably incorrectly) -- though interestingly, HN's fave non-cloud vendor Hetzner would only charge $2M :P

[fleabitdev]

Isn't it a little reductive to look at basic infrastructure costs? I used Hetzner as a surrogate for the raw cost of bandwidth, plus overheads. If you need to serve data outside Europe, the budget tier of BunnyCDN is four times more expensive than Hetzner.

But you might be right - in a market where the price of the same good varies by two orders of magnitude, I could believe that even the nice vendors are charging a 400% markup.

[icecube123]

Yea, I always laugh when folks talk about how expensive they claim bandwidth is for companies. Large “internet” companies are just paying a small monthly cost for transit at an IX. They arent paying $xx/gig ($1/gig) like the average consumer is. If you buy a 100gig port for $2k, it costs the same if you’re using 5 GB a day or 8 PB per day.

[stanac]

Off topic question.

> I imagine 90%+ is peered or hosted inside ISPs, not via transit

How hosting inside ISPs function? Does ISP have to MITM? I heard similar claims for Netflix and other streaming media, like ISPs host/cache the data themselves. Do they have to have some agreement with Steam/Netflix?

[icecube123]

Yea netflix will ship a server to an ISP (Cox, comcast, starlink, rogers, telus etc) so the customers of that ISP can access that server directly. It improves performance for those users and reduces the load on the ISP’s backbone/transit. Im guessing other large companies will do this as well.

A lot of people are using large distributed DNS servers like 8.8.8.8 or 1.1.1.1 and these cansometimes direct users to incorrect CDN servers, so EDNS was created to help with it. I always use 9.9.9.11 instead of 9.9.9.9 to hopefully help improve performance.

[detaro]

The CDN/content provider ships servers to the ISP which puts them into their network. The provider is just providing connectivity and not involved on a content-level, so no MITM etc needed.