Enlarging the tubes

In my work inbox this morning, a message from TeleGeography. Their latest report on IP transit pricing is out. This bit struck me: 1,000Mbits of transit over Gigabit Ethernet in Bucharest now costs no more than it does in London - and only a couple of dollars more than in San Francisco. That’s incredible, and impressive. Talk about returning to Europe. Interestingly, the price is almost identical whether you’re in North America or Europe; but it’s higher by a factor of seven in Sao Paulo.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 6th, 2008 at 11:44 am and is filed under A Fistful Of Euros, Economics and demography, Europe and the world, The European Union, Transition and accession, Websites. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.

1. Julien Frisch Says:
   October 6th, 2008 at 11:55 am

   I don’t get the message…

   An apple in Bucureşti costs not much more than an apple in London or San Francisco. However, apples in Sao Paulo are much more expensive.

2. Richard J Says:
   October 6th, 2008 at 2:11 pm

   That’s impressive - I remember as a fresher in 1996 being told that one large Romanian university’s sole internet connection was a 28.8kb modem.

   Now, if they could only do something about the packs of wild dogs roaming the streets…

3. Paul Says:
   October 6th, 2008 at 6:09 pm

   Richard there are less stray (not wild) dogs in Bucharest now than in 1996 but it still is a frustrating problem. Internet access is much better.

4. Richard J Says:
   October 6th, 2008 at 8:38 pm

   Stray dogs! Despite actually being a native English speaker I’ve had a complete brainfart about the exact phrase for a fortnight now…

   I was there for a work conference a few weeks back. I’d expected the ‘interesting’ architecture, but the ubiquitous packs of dogs were a real surprise.

5. Paul Says:
   October 7th, 2008 at 2:19 pm

   Richard I’m not a native English speaker so I don’t really understand why you had a “brainfart”. As for ’stray’ I double checked in here http://dictionary.reference.com/browse/stray and the dictionary says:
   “5.a domestic animal found wandering at large or without an owner.
   6.any homeless or friendless person or animal.”

   I was saying that the dogs are not wild because some of them were abandoned, all of them have various levels of contact with people, a lot of them are fed by people. I wouldn’t call the dogs ‘feral’ either since they live in a city and not in the wilderness - as the Dingo- and don’t generally hunt. By ‘wild dog’ I understand species such as the African wild dog
   http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/African_hunting_dog

   While I do understand your surprise I want to add that Bucharest’s dog problem is mentioned in pretty much every Bucharest travel guide I’ve read. Hope your trip was not all negative.

6. Paul Says:
   October 7th, 2008 at 2:22 pm

   Richard I’m not a native English speaker so I don’t really understand why you had a “brainfart”. As for ’stray’ I double checked and the dictionary -reference(dot)com-says:
   “5.a domestic animal found wandering at large or without an owner.
   6.any homeless or friendless person or animal.”

   I was saying that the dogs are not wild because some of them were abandoned, all of them have various levels of contact with people, a lot of them are fed by people. I wouldn’t call the dogs ‘feral’ either since they live in a city and not in the wilderness - as the Dingo- and don’t generally hunt. By ‘wild dog’ I understand species such as the African wild dog.

   While I do understand your surprise I want to add that Bucharest’s ‘dog problem’ is mentioned in pretty much every travel guide about Romania I’ve read. Hope your trip was not all negative.