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RE: Current street prices for US Internet Transit

  • From: William B. Norton
  • Date: Tue Aug 17 13:57:27 2004


First - As for whether the US Transit market is healthy or unhealthy... I am not privy to the ISP calculations that demonstrate financial viability at these prices, so I can only go on the sentiments expressed by folks that have done the analysis for their companies and have shared their views with me or my colleagues.

Having said that...It certainly appears that the majors can't make money in this transit market, and they would probably say that the bottom feeders are greasing the skids to financial ruin for this industry.

At 08:50 PM 8/16/2004 -0700, Michel Py wrote:
The really interesting question IMHO is this: does said content company
also peers, or just buys transit? I read in Bill Norton's papers that a
content company is a good candidate to peer with large tier-2s.
Well, it is the *large* network-savvy Content Guys that I see peering quite a bit of their traffic. For these guys the motivation seems to be the performance benefits (it is all about pages coming up fast, end user behavior stuff), but the financial savings isn't far behind. FOr these guys the savings are still in the millions per annum. And these are the guys that do enough volume to negotiate transit prices in the teens.

>         The Cost of Internet Transit in..
> Commit  AU      SG      JP      HK      USA
> 1 Mbps  $720    $625    $490    $185    $125
> 10 Mbps $410    $350    $150    $100    $80
> 100 Mbps        $325    $210    $110    $80     $45
> 1000 Mbps       $305    $115    $50     $50     $30

Someone mentioned that this was comparing apples to oranges. Indeed it
is, <stuff deleted>
I would disagree that these are apples and oranges comparisons - these are real prices (normalized to USD) for transit that someone in the country would pay to access the big 'I' Internet. The Peering Coordinators I spoke with that have expanded into these markets did point out that each Peering Ecosystem differs - I think I documented about 10 differences in the Asia Pacific Peering Guidebook - but, ultimately, they will need to buy transit in that market. So these numbers are useful for budgeting for network expansion into Asia.

I would also share that the local loop prices in these other markets vary widely ; an OC-3 local loop in Singapore may be twice the cost of a distance insensitive OC-3 local loop in Hong Kong. To that end, the business cases for peering will be quite different.

Bill