Mike Hammett wrote:
I have yet to see anyone go under $15 on 100 megs. That said, I haven't
really been looking in a few months.
Tier 1 is available for under $15. Of course the price per meg gets
people all screwed up since most people don't want 100 megs. For
example, let's say you are looking for 20 meg commit burstable to 100.
Your only choice with Cogent is 100 megs for $15. However, paying retail
for Level3 will get 20 meg commit for $45 per meg, which is much higher
than $15, but at the 20 meg level is only $900 MRC vs. Cogent's $1,500 MRC.
Further, let's say you accept that no carrier no matter how good they
are is perfect. That means you need more than one carrier. Now let's say
you do about 50Mbps sustained and want to burst higher. Again, with
Cogent you need to by 100 megs for $1,500 and then some other carrier.
Unfortunately, buying the 100 megs is a waste since if you get another
carrier you will use even less Cogent bandwidth. Now let's say you
pickup 20 megs from Savvis for $30, 20 megs from GBLX for $30, and 20
megs from Telia for $20. That would mean you have a total commit across
carriers of 60 megs and are paying a total of $1,400. Additionally, that
allows you to burst up to 300 megs across the 3 carriers.
Obviously, there is a whole host of issues and solutions that can come
with mix and matching providers, but one thing seems to always be true;
Cogent's inflexibility in their services makes it harder to put them in
the mix.
In our case, we don't sell bandwidth as cheap as Cogent or even as some
of the tier 1s we buy from. We believe our bandwidth is more valuable
for 3 reasons.
First, we will see you any commit you want and allow it to burst as high
as you want. Want 10 meg commit on a GigE? Bring it on. This allows you
to only pay for what you use. Just like other carriers the price per meg
drops as you buy more, but not buying excess capacity even at a higher
rate is cheaper.
Second, we buy from every tier 1 that has interesting routes. After
buying enough tier 1s additional providers don't make the routing any
better. Additionally, we peer with every major content provider and
attempt to peer with tier 2 and tier 3 providers when we can. The big
guys like to play favorites with peering policies, while we just want
the best routes.
Third, we understand what BGP is and is not. BGP has no concept for the
performance of routes. Performance matters! We route optimize our
bandwidth to ensure not the shortest or cheapest route, but the best
performing route.
At the end of the day, all of our businesses are measured by the quality
of reliability of our internet service. Many WISPs like to focus on the
wireless portion, but it is the sum of the parts that matters.
-Matt
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