That’s some serious traffic
According to a ZDNet article today, YouTube served up 2,500,000,000, that’s 2.5 billion, movies in June. That’s some serious bandwidth being used and some serious cash required to pay for it. That works out to an average rate of approximately 1 Gigabit per second (Gbps) depending on what figure you use for the average size of a 2 minute video. For my calculations I used 1 MB (MegaByte).
2,500,000,000MegaBytes=1,953,125 gigabits
1,953,125 gigabits/2592000 seconds[30 days]= a sustained rate of 0.753520448 gigabits per second.
A gigabit (Gb) is 1024 times larger than a megabit (Mb). That is to say a Gb pipe can theoretically hold 1024 times as much data as a 1Mb pipe and 10.24 times as much as a 100Mb connection.
So assuming the average size of a movie is 1MB (it’s probably a bit bigger) then they need a committed bit rate of at least 1 Gbps as IP systems carry at least a 25% packet overhead to prevent packet collisions (which would cause dropped packets and that in turn would require those packets to be resent thereby slowing the whole system down.) A well designed system increases bandwidth (amount of available capacity) somewhere between 60 and 70% capacity on the pipe. So they actually need two Gbps upstream connections.
That’s serious dinero gang. I don’t know what a 1Gbps backbone connection costs but I can tell you that a dedicated OC3 (155.52Mbps) will cost you somewhere between $10,000 and $13,000 CDN per month here in Canada. What YouTube needs is something close to an OC24 (1.244 Gbps) which has 8 times the capacity. Now as with most things price for capacity comes down as quantity goes up so it would not be 8 time the cost of an OC3 but it’s not going to be a whole lot less. Cost will depend on how much backbone provider competition there is where their servers are colocated or hosted. So it looks like their cost for data transport is going to be somewhere between 60 and 100K per month depending on file sizes, compressionm, and backbone providers.
Man I’d love to have that account 
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Comments
Comment from Mike
Time: 7/17/2006, 8:20 am
That’s interesting about the bandwidth fact. My daily stats reports refer to “Bandwidth Transfered” …So, is this term techinically not corrrect? I’m looking to you for answers here Doug, ’cause I have no idea about this stuff!
Comment from Doug Alder
Time: 7/17/2006, 9:06 am
Mike/Stu - data transfer would be more correct than bandwidth. Due to the popularity of web page hosting, and the advent of software that makes it easy for relatively non-technical people to become hosting sellers, the term bandwidth has been so heavily abused in recent years that the two terms have become synonymous.
Even I, when I have my work hat on, have to use the term that way as the majority of people simply don’t know the difference (although educating them has frequently worked to make the sale) . It is unfortunate though as networking is a technical business, a science of engineering as it were, and precision is a prerequisitie of any science in order for predictable results to occur.
In data systems bandwidth is a measure of capacity not quantity. In wireless it is a measure of frequency range. It’s similarly annoying as those that don’t know the difference between KB (or kB) and Kb (or kb)and confuse them. For the record data transfer is always measured in bits (b) per second while the size of the data is measured in bytes (B). I think early modem software designers and networking software designers are to blanme for the confusion as rather than show a large number for transfer rates (say 1581 kbps)they would show it as 197kBps (that’s the speed of a T1 line btw). Again confusing quantity with capacity. I remember watching file download rates in Internet Expliorer a long time ago (while on a modem) and it would stsrt off as Kbps then at some point change to KBps and it confused the hell out of me because I didn’t know the difference at the time (back in the mid 90s).
Comment from Mike
Time: 7/17/2006, 2:00 pm
Thank you Doug, that was very clear and helpful. To paraphrase Higgins: “By George, I think I’ve got it!”
Comment from Stu Savory
Time: 7/17/2006, 3:50 am
So educate me : what IS your preferred term instead od ‘bandwidth’?