North American Network Operators Group
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Re: single homed public-peer bandwidth ... pricing survey ?

  • From: Matthew Crocker
  • Date: Tue Mar 06 18:39:21 2007


Hello,

I am currently hosted in a small, independent
datacenter that has 4 or 5 public peers (L3, Sprint,
UUnet, AT&T and   ... ?)

They are most likely giving you a single feed to their core which has 4-5 upstream connections to transit providers. Not peers really, Im sure they are paying for their transit.

They are a very nice facility, very technical and
professional, and have real people on-site 24 hours
per day ... remote hands, etc.  All very high end and
well managed.

I'm sure some of the $$ you pay for bandwidth pays for their amazing support structure. 

But, I am charged between $150 and $180 per megabit/s
for non-redundant, single-homed bandwidth (not sure
which provider they put it on) and even if I commit to
20 or 30 megabits/s it still only drops down to $100 -
$120 per megabit/s.

So naturally, I am very interested when I see HE.NET
offering bandwidth for $20/mb/s, and it looks like
Level3 is selling for $30/mb/s...

Are there two classes of bandwidth in the world ?  Is
it reasonable and expected that single homed public
peered bandwidth is, circa Jan 2007, going for above
$100/mb/s while private peered bandwidth like L3 and
HE.NET is $30 and below ?

Or am I just getting ripped off ?

Probably not

Where can I go to read and learn more about the
advantages and disadvantages (from a networking
standpoint) of switching from an independent, public
peered datacenter to, say, L3 or HE.NET ?

Search for the problems Cogent & Level(3) had off and on over the past couple years and decide for yourself if you want to have a single connection to a 'tier 1' provider. Personally I like to have >1 connections to a 'tier 1' provider.

Keep in mind that in order to be redundant your provider needs to buy your bandwidth twice from their upstream providers. If you are using 10mbps they need to buy 10mbps from Provider A & 10 mbps from Provider B. That way if A fails then your traffic will automatically switch to Provider B. So, if your provider is paying $30/mbps for bandwidth that is really $60/mbps. That price also doesn't cover the amazing support or the insanely priced routers that are needed to handle the ever increasing bloat that is the Internet routing table.

Not knowing all of your specifics I think you are paying a fair price.

--
Matthew S. Crocker
President
Crocker Communications, Inc.
Internet Division
PO BOX 710
Greenfield, MA 01302-0710
http://www.crocker.com