If it costs $3 a month for my VPN to provide the same gigabit speeds as my ISP, why does my ISP charge so much more? It can’t be the cost of maintaining the infrastructure or paying employees, right? So would it just be lack of completition?
Lack of comprehension. On your part.
You’re comparing apples to oranges. Your VPN doesn’t “provide” any speeds. They don’t have or maintain all the infrastructure that your ISP does to physically connect your home to the internet. VPN just uses the connection from your ISP to provide an encrypted tunnel to their server, nothing more. Take away the ISP connection and your VPN doesn’t connect you to anything.
Because without your ISP your VPN wouldn’t connect to anything
Ummm… VPNs don’t provide a connection to the Internet…
Why does a plastic surgeon cost more than a plastic mask?
Bandwidth in a datacenter with direct connections to Internet exchanges is pretty cheap. The datacenter might even BE an Internet exchange point already. To explain simply, an Internet exchange point (IX) is just a facility where different Internet network providers agree to plug in some fiber and negotiate direct network connections between each other. Bandwidth in these places tends to be pretty cheap, since the cost to install a link between two providers when that link might be a 6ft fiber patch cable, or maybe a run to the next cabinet or room over, is pretty low, especially when compared with for example buying a fiber line from your ISP and having them bury it and trench it to your house.
If you look online at dedicated servers for rent, you’ll see that it’s relatively affordable even as a single person trying to rent 1 server to get a 1Gbps or 10Gbps dedicated server. Large VPN providers generally have bulk agreements with their datacenters, so they pay even less per server and per gigabit of bandwidth than you would if you went to the same datacenter and rented a single server yourself. They can leverage the cheap bandwidth at datacenters and economies of scale to access a large amount of network capacity for relatively low cost.
Your ISP, on the other hand, not only needs to connect back to the same type of Internet exchange points that a datacenter would connect to and pay for network port capacity there just like a datacenter does, but they also need to bring it all the way out to your house somehow. Whether that’s miles of fiber optic cables, copper wires, cell towers, satellites in orbit, or radio dishes hanging off of grain silos… depends on what type of Internet connection you have. But either way, the infrastructure to get the Internet from these relatively few exchange points where all the interconnection occurs out to every single home and business is where the real cost and limitations of ISP’s exist. This infrastructure is spanning a large area and is much more complex, expensive to maintain, and difficult to upgrade than a handful of high capacity fiber lines going between a datacenter and an Internet exchange point.
VPN is just a shared server on a single connection with IPs on it.
Internet Service requires physical cables and all to be setup and relies on complex systems, customer support teams, technicians, etc. much more expensive operations.
Running (and maintaining) physical cables under the streets to every building is expensive.
see where you’re coming from, but the cost isn’t about speed. It’s about the physical infrastructure needed for internet access. VPNs ride on that infrastructure without bearing the costs of maintaining it.
They are fundamentally two different things. A ISP is supplying all the wires and infrastructure for the highway. Your VPN is using this infrastructure to get to it for you to get his service totally different.
Is this suppose to be a April fools joke?
It can’t be the cost of maintaining the infrastructure or paying employees, right?
Do you have any idea how much running fibre, buying and maintaining network equipment, and providing proper support to end users costs?
VPN providers can just rent a server in a datacentre, spend a couple of hours giving stock responses to support tickets, and call it a day.
Why can Amazon pay someone minimum wage to move thousands of kg of merchandise around their warehouse in a single hour, while it costs whole dollars to get a single package sent to your house?
Why did you cook OP like that. Can you rub more Salt on OP to add more flavor for the Cooking process?
That’s why I asked the question
I get this, but then they connect to the actual place I’m connecting to as a middle-man, no?
Ignore me, someone else answered the question.
I feel like, for someone so obviously lacking technical knowledge, you just wasted an awful lot of words trying to explain to them in a way they won’t understand.
I’ve rented a 1gbps seedbox before, along with my cheap-ass VPN reaching 1gbps, and it made me curious as to what might make it so much less expensive. I appreciate you taking my question at face value unlike many others on here, but that’s just Reddit.