Google's fiber leeching caper
Everybody who pays @95th dreams of doing something like this the very first time that 95th billing is explained to them.  I mean <i>Everbody</i>.<p>What the Article fails to explain, is that there is both a port cost, and a minimum commit.    For much less than what it would have cost them for the port, and minimum commit on a 1 Gig connection, they could have simply mailed their data via USPS and had it there in three days.<p>Also, if we do the math - and presume that they only ran 1 gigabit for 5% of the time - 1 gigabit/second at 36 hours (5% of a month) in terabytes = 16 Terabytes - which barely makes it into the "10s of terabytes" category, and well within the "Just mail an AIT-3 tape. [Edit - cheaper yet, just load up the hard drives that you are going to install anyways in your destination]<p>Edit 2:<p>Doh - <a href="http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte" rel="nofollow">http://www.mkomo.com/cost-per-gigabyte</a> shows that the largest hard drives back then were 20 Gigabytes.  We're talking a minimum of 1000 hard drives for "10s" of Terabytes.<p>Maybe that 1 GigCircuit Hack wasn't such a bad idea after all.