Comment by CranberryDefuse
2 years ago
> Signal spends around $2.8 million dollars per year on bandwidth to support sending messages and files (such as photos, videos, voice notes, documents, etc.) [...] At current traffic levels, the amount of outbound bandwidth that is required to support Signal voice and video calls is around 20 petabytes per year (that’s 20 million gigabytes) which costs around $1.7 million dollars per year in bandwidth fees just for calling, and that figure doesn’t include the development costs associated with hiring experienced engineers to maintain our calling software, or the cost of the necessary server infrastructure to support those calls.
20 petabytes per year is around 5000 Mbps only for audio and video calling. So 5000 HD video calls all year round.
Signal is known for the large bandwidth needed for calling but that sounds too much and not really scalable in the future.
Paying 2.8m for 20pb of bandwidth is two orders of magnitude more expensive than it needs to be. You pay significantly more using cloud hosting providers rather than dedicated server resellers. I would recommend signal consider just renting dedicated servers from providers like OVH for their voice relays.