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.
Comments
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!