That Q&A document, which blames Rev. Todd Wilken and Jeff Schwarz for the mismanagement of all of their supervisors, said that Issues, Etc.’s numerous podcast and on-demand listeners burdened the Synod with $30,000 in bandwidth costs.
Dr. Erich Heidenreich notes:
Amazon’s S3 service charges under 20 cents per gigabyte. The following is from Amazon’s website:
“Data transferred into Amazon S3 costs $0.10 per GB, while data transferred out of Amazon S3 costs $0.18 per GB for the first 10 TB (10,240 GB). Volume discounts are automatically applied for additional data transferred out of Amazon S3; the next 40 TB cost $0.16 per GB and all additional data transferred out of Amazon S3 in a month costs $0.13 per GB. Volume discounts are applied separately for the U.S. and for Europe. There is also a small per-request charge that depends on the operation and the location of the servers you are accessing. PUT and LIST operations cost $0.01 per 1,000 requests, while all other operations cost $0.01 per 10,000 requests for buckets located in the U.S. PUT and LIST operations cost $0.012 per 1,000 requests, while all other operations cost $0.012 per 10,000 requests for buckets located in Europe.”
David Strand says the “average count of monthly ‘Issues’ downloads was 113,801.” And, the average 1 hour episode of Issues, Etc. appears on my iTunes to be about 8MB.
113,801 downloads per month X 12 months = 1,365,612 downloads per year X 8MB each = 11,924,896MB/year.
That rounds out to 12,000 gigabytes per year. If they used Amazon’s service, they could do this for under $2000/year. If it actually cost $30,000/year, as David Strand says, then the synod is paying $2.50 per gigabyte transfered.
It appears this cost figure is either inflated, or whoever was in charge of purchasing bandwidth was not aware that there are much cheaper services out there to choose from than what they were using.
Is David Strand paying $30,000 for something that should cost around $2,000? Should someone with these business skills be firing people for “financial” reasons?
Filed under: Updates
Anybody else old enough to remember the 80’s, when there was a scandal about the military paying $800 for a hammer? Did David Strand ever work for the Pentagon?
Perhaps we should start another blog specifically chronicling the “The Fleecing of the LCMS” like NBC’s nightly “The Fleecing of America” news feature on NBC.
My only guess is that the $30,000 includes not only the bandwidth costs, but mostly likely the cost of having their own T1 or T3 (or multiples thereof) lines over which the traffic travels. T1 & T3 lines are very expensive, but why they would want dedicated lines for Issues, etc. downloads is quite beyond me as in every case where a business has T1 or T3 lines, those lines are shared by everyone and everything needing access to the internet – as such, placing the cost of these lines on the shoulders of Issues, etc. is just wrong.
This is clearly another case, where Mr. Strand finds himself needing to defend his previous lies with more lies, misdirection and disinformation as I would find it hard to believe anyone could be that incompetent.
In no case I could find, is there anyone out there charging anywhere close to $2.50 per GB of bandwidth usage. My own ISP charges me .25c per GB.
Eric,
Strand said the $30,000 was for bandwidth alone — and that the other costs were additional.
Eric,
Here is exactly what Strand said:
“Of course, providing this downloading service incurs costs for the Synod, including about $30,000 this past year for bandwidth. There also are costs associated with the preparation, storage, and maintenance of the downloadable archives.”
In this statement Strand clearly is claiming that the “about $30,000″ cost was “for bandwidth” alone.
Erich
Thank you Eric! I knew that number was fishy.
Well, I can still see where someone could make the argument that bandwidth costs would include the cost of having the lines the data travels over…especially, if they are not particularly technical.
But, again, if he was including the costs of the lines, it still wouldn’t make any sense to have dedicated lines for just Issue, etc. or to force Issues, etc. to bear the full cost for something everyone and everything would use to transfer their data.
I suppose no matter how one looks at it, the $30,000 number is funky.
Cost per megabit-per-second (mbps) are bit complicated due to local loop costs.
Commercial end-user Internet Bandwidth is usually sold with a local loop to deliver the service. For example, if LCMS purchased a 100mbps Internet link, they would likely be paying $25-$30/mbps/month for the Internet bits. But, the telecom service to deliver that rate of bandwidth (an OC-3 or dedicated Ethernet) to the purple palace would likely be twice the cost of the bits.
The two expenses are usually rolled together on the bill as one single cost. For example, if you are in St. Louis and using Savvis or AT&T (SBCIS/MFS), you will get a bill that includes the bits and the loop. You cannot order one without the other.
So, if LCMS had to have lots of bandwidth, it is believable that it could cost $30,000. But, questions do remain. Over what time period? How much bandwidth? And, how did he allocate the bandwidth expenses across all the other entities?
The problem exists in the fact that excessive bandwidth expenses can be mitigated by using smarter network topology and better networking technologies.
And, I know for a fact that there were people who offered to donate bandwidth to help serve the IE content. I was one who offered. I have enough bandwidth at my disposal to serve all of the LCMS content and IE. And, I e-mailed Strand myself to offer my assistance.
I even offered my time, and talents as a networking engineer, for free, to help the concordiatech staff to mitigate some of the networking problems they said they were having with serving the IE content. And, I made the offer in such a way that it could and would be seen as Strand and his staff saving the day. But, they did not take me up on it.
So, do I believe that the $30K additional expenses are real? Sure I do. But, they didn’t have to be. And, that was a conscious choice on the part of Mr. Strand.
I would recommend handing that $30K expense to Mr. Strand to pay out of his pocket.
“So, do I believe that the $30K additional expenses are real? Sure I do. But, they didn’t have to be. And, that was a conscious choice on the part of Mr. Strand.”
So we’re back to a management problem.
BBC, I wrote above: “It appears this cost figure is either inflated, or whoever was in charge of purchasing bandwidth was not aware that there are much cheaper services out there to choose from than what they were using.”
I should have added: “…or perhaps they know there are cheaper alternatives and they’re simply not worried about wasting synodical dollars.”
This appears to be a case of “The Fleecing of the LCMS.”