One thing many companies complain about is the price of bandwidth. The fact is price varies - greatly. Telegeography has a sampling of how much prices fluctuate. Why do they fluctuate?

Older contracts do not have declining prices, so people who bought a 5 year deal are paying more than people shopping now.

Where is the bandwidth? In about 8 cities - NYC, LA, DC, MIA, Dallas, ATL, CHI, and San Jose - bandwidth is really inexpensive (inside carrier hotels) because it is very competitive. In these cities, just about every carrier has capacity and wants to sell it to you. As you move outside those 8, capacity, availability, lit buildings, and competition change -- so too does the pricing.

The loop, the transport, the delivery of the bandwidth is the expensive part. It needs to be factored in.

In some of the examples, customers might have bought transit from companies during a period when they were having a fire sale or just plain wanted to take business away from another carrier. Or one carrier knew that capacity was limited (or the other carrier had implementation issues), so they could charge more.

If you need it now (and you want it in Ethernet instead of TDM (OC-x)) be willing to pay extra.

Looking for bandwidth? Drop me an email let me know what you are seeing.