Bandwidth and Electricity Charges Increase
Sunday, April 13th, 2008As predicted last year, bandwidth prices showed a steady increase rather than decrease. The cost of repairing the damages of the submarine cables due to the Taiwan earthquake was more or less passed back to the providers like us.
Another problem is the intensification of price war between the domestic ISPs with each trying to outdo each other with faster and greater bandwidth plans at a lesser and lesser costs.
Thirdly the electricity costs remained as high as ever, in fact higher as the months passed by, with the USD in decline that worsen the inflation and also that of utility. Consumption of electricity of a medium size datacentre can easily exceed $100 000/mth, this is an extremely heavy burden which will get worse even it gets better.
Our company has been trying out on going green, using solar or alternative sources of power but that itself had proven to be extremely prohibitive especially when we are not experts in that particular area. It is often difficult to find consultants with regards to alternative energy in Singapore. Typical overseas companies froze when they heard of the electricity we need per square feet for our datacentre operations. I guess it will be sometime before green energy really catch on. Not at energy intensive sectors such as datacentres yet but perhaps at flats and normal households as it is an extreme challenge to be able to provide so much energy per square feet as that required by a datacentre.
I have checked with experts from USA and Europe, to power our datacentre would need the above to be larger than our datacentre building itself by a factor of 3 at least.