[el chupacabra]

Something that I've been curious about lately is where a company like Google or Apple per say would buy their bandwidth. Or do they own their own bandwidth. I kind of like the idea of owning my own bandwidth if thats possible. If Google wanted to avoid bandwidth costs would they have to own the phone/cable lines. Does anyone happen to know where it all ends? How would you set up a server and minimize bandwidth costs?

[shifuimam]

Big companies lease dedicated lines from the telecom giants, like Verizon and AT&T. My company (25,000+ employees worldwide, with multiple locations across the United States alone) leases several T3 lines from AT&T. Last time I heard, our monthly charges for that were well above $300,000...but when you're making billions annually, that's a pittance.

Schools can get access to the Abeline (Internet2) network, but that's dedicated for certain uses, like transmitting massive files between schools for graduate work or research. On a campus that has access to Internet2, students usually are not just wontonly allowed to use that network...

You more or less can't "own" bandwith. If you want to run your own server, either get cheap hosting and deal with bandwidth limitations, or find somewhere (e.g. if you live on a college campus) you can leech bandwidth from and host a server - but be prepared to deal with the consequences if it turns out you're violating whatever TOS or policy that comes with that network connection.

[Laminar]

Here at ISU we have ungodly bandwidth...updates from Apple come in at ~16MB/sec or faster.
For example, that little spike is a 51MB file:


But it's made clear that we're not allowed to take advantage of the network to profit for ourselves. So I couldn't charge someone to host their website.

[Doofy]

It's actually ridiculously cheap to get your own DS3 in the US. Looked into it a while back - cheaper than an E2 (8.5 Mbps) here.

[PB2K]

my school is on the 1gb/sec ring. my colleagues tested it once and it went 120megabytes download a second

[mduell]

Apple pays Akamai to do their media hosting.