At 10Gbps I can retrieve 3TB within an hour.

If you can afford 10Gbps to the internet, $22k is probably chump change.

10Gbps EC2 instances start at $0.742/hour. Welcome to the cloud. ;-)

I assume the cost is in retrieval though and counted per the Job Creation API, regardless of whether and how quickly you download the data.

but you're right that the 3TB/hour use-case is very hypothetical. Internet archival is just not suitable for those kind of volumes. I think the point OP was making that mistakes like using archives that are too large, or requesting many at once could cost you a lot.

Well, yes and no.

If you actually USE 10gpbs your data transfer bill is going to be around $167k per month (That's for transferring 3.34PB).

Actually, a bit higher than that since I calculated all based on the cheapest tier EC2 will quote on the web, 5 cents per gigabyte.

For a one time 3TB download to an EC2 instance, priced at the first pricing tier of $0.12/gigabyte, that transfer will cost $360, and take around 40 minutes.

Glacier to EC2 traffic is free if your instance is in the same region as the Glacier endpoint and $0.01/GB otherwise.

Afford a 10Gbps connection? You can buy 1Gbps transit for under $1/Mbps, and much less at 10Gbps. So, with a monthly bill of, say, $5K, for the 10Gbps IP, $22k is not quite "chump change".

I would hope he's talking about direct connect (http://aws.amazon.com/directconnect/) as otherwise, you're correct.

You can afford 1Gbps for as little as $70/mo. Currently only in Kansas City, but it will probably expand to other cities soon.

That's a 1Gbps connection. Try sustaining 1Gpbs and see if you don't start getting nastygrams.

There is a huge difference between a residential connection with a peak speed of X and an X speed connection.