I think this answers my underlying curiosity. I'm still surprised that no one has come out with a low cost solution that would drive the prices down though. The barrier to entry, which is cost like you mentioned in your deck, must be fairly large.
Exactly. The barrier to entry is not the cost of a single line. It’s the cost of provisioning a global network where each server has a line with sufficient capacity.
If you’re bootstrapping a CDN company, for example, you can’t just start with a single server. You need the global footprint as a selling point. But since you can’t provision that bandwidth elastically, you’re going to have a monthly bill of roughly $1k per POP as soon as you start the company, significantly reducing your runway.
The reason there are so few solutions is because the status quo is charging $/Gb, it’s a huge source of income for cloud providers, and it makes traffic engineering significantly easier because users have incentive to minimize bandwidth costs.
I never fully pitched it. That slide deck was mostly to sort through the ideas I had at the time and try to identify some fundamental truths of the market.
The product I'm interested in building is basically a bandwidth marketplace. It's a hard problem and I've been thinking about it for a while. In college I researched "TorCoin" for my senior thesis which explored the possibilities of a proof-of-bandwidth cryptocurrency. I know some ICO's are working on this now but I'm really skeptical the idea can work without a killer product in the hands of users driving adoption. That's the product I want to work on. I'm still figuring out exactly what it is, but I've been thinking about this kind of thing heavily for the past 5 years and feel pretty confident I can execute if given the right time, team and funding.
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I think this answers my underlying curiosity. I'm still surprised that no one has come out with a low cost solution that would drive the prices down though. The barrier to entry, which is cost like you mentioned in your deck, must be fairly large.
Exactly. The barrier to entry is not the cost of a single line. It’s the cost of provisioning a global network where each server has a line with sufficient capacity.
If you’re bootstrapping a CDN company, for example, you can’t just start with a single server. You need the global footprint as a selling point. But since you can’t provision that bandwidth elastically, you’re going to have a monthly bill of roughly $1k per POP as soon as you start the company, significantly reducing your runway.
The reason there are so few solutions is because the status quo is charging $/Gb, it’s a huge source of income for cloud providers, and it makes traffic engineering significantly easier because users have incentive to minimize bandwidth costs.
Definitely seems like a market opportunity. Did you find any interest when you were pitching?
I never fully pitched it. That slide deck was mostly to sort through the ideas I had at the time and try to identify some fundamental truths of the market.
The product I'm interested in building is basically a bandwidth marketplace. It's a hard problem and I've been thinking about it for a while. In college I researched "TorCoin" for my senior thesis which explored the possibilities of a proof-of-bandwidth cryptocurrency. I know some ICO's are working on this now but I'm really skeptical the idea can work without a killer product in the hands of users driving adoption. That's the product I want to work on. I'm still figuring out exactly what it is, but I've been thinking about this kind of thing heavily for the past 5 years and feel pretty confident I can execute if given the right time, team and funding.
Really interesting. Thanks for the info!