Having worked a lot numbers in recent months as RawVoice has been ramping up to add hosting to our family of sites we have been factoring the true cost of bandwidth.

In today’s dollars bandwidth is generally around .15 cents a gig in bulk, and while you can drive the price down some more with quantity it is still a considerable expense when you are looking at moving multiple terabytes of data.

Using Amazon S3 as one of many models, If you look at raw cost of moving 1 terabyte of traffic this equates to $153.60  per month. This does not factor in storage cost, server cost etc.

The reason I bring this up in the first place is that their is speculation that S3 could be faced with some competition from Microsoft. If this speculation is correct then some are predicting bandwidth cost could drop to .015 a gig which would lower the cost of bandwidth to $15.36 a terabyte.

If this happens, overnight the un-metered server industry that serves up a significant amount of media would face extermination in that class of service. You would see a number of startup and or existing places in the space that would build out media hosting offerings that could re-align the entire online industry.

While I personally welcome .015 cent per gig bandwidth I am sure their are many in the space that are going to scoff that this price point is not attainable. Only time will tell but one thing is for sure the price is going to have to come down at some point if the digital evolution is to continue to evolve. Scripting News