In order to complete a business plan, I need the following information
about the cost/price of bandwidth on the Internet.

What is the cost/price for streaming a 600MB (megabytes) file to 10,000 user?
What is the cost/price for making a 600MB (megabytes) file available
for download to 10,000 user? (PROGRESSIVE DOWNLOAD)
What is the cost/price for making a 600MB (megabytes) file available
for download to 10,000 user? (REGULAR DOWNLOAD)

Any idea about the cost for the same downloads in 1 and 2 years from
now? (roadmap pricing)?

NOTE: PLS SUPPLY PROOF or quote from a survey or market research.
Don't just throw a number if it cannot be demonstrated... YOU'll not
get paid if you cannot supply some kind of proof you know what you're
talking about ;-)

COST means how much it costs for the content delivery provider e.g. IBM
PRICE means how much they ask their customer to pay for this service

Is there any free resources to track the cost of B/w? (the answer to
this question is free)

Whether a file is streamed, downloaded to a user's pc or the like
makes absolutely no difference to bandwidth consumed. Just different
marketing - e.g. if you only offer a stream version then you can force
a user to come back to your site and redownload it there if they want
to view it again later.

With that said 600mb file to 10,000 users comes out at about 5800 GB
assuming each one views it once.

Generally most providers don't publish their exact rates on their
websites for marketing reasons (when they do this they can change the
price depending on the client/product in a way even when products may
use the same lines). Providers wise there are several ones you shoudl
be aware of. Pretty much the top providers are considered AT&T, Qwest,
and Yipes. The lower end of the spectrum would be Cogent (recently
bought out by another company) - personally not recommended for a
mission critical tasks.

You can pay in several ways for bandwidth - by usage or by capacity.
By usage I mean that your data can use all of the provider's lines as
much as needed - you get the bill on the total amount of data
transferred. In the capacity scenario you pay for a certain capacity
line(s) - you can use none of it, or you can fill it's capacity to the
brim. For instance if you pay by usage I would estimate you can get
them to charge you for slightly less then a dollar per gigabyte given
your rather large order. You may be able to get more bang for your
buck with paying "by capacity" - depends on what you'll be offering.

Given I can't link to any price sheets online (as there aren't any)
here are some phone numbers where you can get quotes:
Yipes - 1-877-740-6600 (ask about Yipes Now)
AT&T - 1-800-222-0400
Qwest - 1-800-743-3793

Sincerely,
Oleg

So you would recommend we contact AT&T? Interesting... I was more
planning to use services such as AKAMAI. Are they competitive with
prices from the providers of fixed lines above? Thanks for your help.

I'm not sure if this fits in with your plan, but you should consider
as an option using BitTorrent technology. It's free/opensourced, so
your only costs of implementation are bandwidth.

Right off the bat, you can find more info here: http://bitconjurer.org/BitTorrent/

Yes, it does require a client be downloaded, and yes, it does
reccomend that you route one TCP port (though it will function without
doing so). The install base of BitTorrent (and clients that support
BitTorrent) is in the millions of users.

I can't provide market research, as I don't believe any has been done
on it (Though major companies such as Id Software use BitTorrent for
content distribution, and VALVe has hired the creator of BitTorrent to
bring his experties in content distribution to their STEAM product).

There are three components to a BitTorrent swarm (A swarm being a
collection of users downloading a file). There is the web server,
which hosts a torrent file, typically under 100KB, which has
information about the file. This includes an SHA1 hash for blocks of
the file (Everything BitTorrent sends is hashed to ensure it's perfect
data), and other metadata. Then there is the tracker, which acts as a
central server that all clients connect to for information, such as
lists of other peers (people downloading). And lastly, there are the
clients downloading the file (called peers, who have an incomplete
copy of the file, but still upload what they have to other users), and
people who have finished downloading the file (seeds, they have a
complete copy and still upload to other users).

When you start a swarm, you seed the torrent initially until there are
sufficient seeds on the swarm. That is to say, once enough other users
have complete copies of the files, you can stop uploading the file.
The torrent is then self-sufficient.

The tracker, however, must always be run. They typically don't consume
much bandwidth, and if 10,000 users were to download a file at the
same time, it would probably use on the order of 25-30KB/s
(200-240kbit/s).

You could probably handle this from a residential or commercial
broadband connection, of the type with 512-640kbit of upstream.

However, if you wanted a professional connection, and the ability to
get the swarm going faster, renting a dedicated server would be the
most affordable way to go. They typically cost 55-99$ per month for
the base models, and have 500-2000GB per month of transfer depending
on the provider.

BitTorrent is ONLY good for regular downloads, it cannot handle
progressive or streaming downloads.

As a supplementary to my comment, I neglected to mention that a 600MB
file would likely require on the order of 1000-2000MB of seeding.
Beyond that, the swarm should be self-supporting.

There are several clients that support a mode called "super-seed"
which is designed to reduce the initial seeding that must be done
before other seeds appear. These may be of interest to you. They tend
to be more complicated than the official client, but you could use
these clients to seed, and still reccomend that your users use the
official client.

Such clients are:

http://bittornado.com/
http://azureus.sourceforge.net/
http://pingpong-abc.sourceforge.net/

Other clients may support Super-Seed mode, but those are the only ones
I can pull off the top of my head. Keep in mind that ALL BitTorrent
clients are compatible for normal use. It doesn't matter what client
you seed with, any user can use any client they want.

The official BitTorrent client, which would be my reccomended client
for downloading, is easy to install (Run the EXE and it's installed),
and has NO user configuration whatsoever. As I mentioned earlier, it
is reccomended that the user route port 6881 TCP at the very least to
his machine, but it's optional and only serves to increase his
connectivity and therefore download speed. Other than that, the user
is simply required to run the installer EXE. Then, any URL they click
on that leads to a torrent file should launch the client, which
resembles an Internet Explorer download window.

Thanks for your feedback. We've looked at Bittorrent and unfortunately
it is not suitable for our application. The data we have to transfer
vary depending on the users so the principle of replicating the data
between peers does not really work.
We were also worried about ISP; the one we work with has started to
filter the bt traffic.
One last question: where did you get the 50-99$ price for a server
with 500-2000Gb of traffic. It seems pretty cheap. Is there one
supplier you recommend that has prices in that range?