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How much do Providers pay for Bandwidth?
I am confused as to the wide variation in the offers section here. Some offer 1TB and other much more and deals can be similar prices.
Hetzner for example have a minimum of 20TB, inc on their cheapest $4.59pm vps deals.
How much do providers pay for bandwidth? Do providers get unlimited or do they get a fixed amount in their co-location deals?
Comments
Looong story
Depend , how much GBs you negotiate with you provider, what type of peers have you provider, what region it's
Europe / USA Cheap network speed & Asia / Africa expensive network speed
Depend if provider it's connected directly to a IX
Depend provider with what Tier 1 ISP have contracts sign
Here depend you (as a customer) if you want Port speed with anti-ddos included or without anti-ddos included
And many many others examples
As a provider, you generally pay according to 95/5 percentile, most Internet exchanges have “flats”, but there are more and more that also offer commitment (e.g. DataIX/GNM-IX, ERA-IX and so on).
Other providers also buy flats, which is attractive if you have predictable traffic (e.g. no DDoS attacks), usually much cheaper. On the other hand, there is also the option of direct connections with providers, which is usually cost-neutral if you have decent traffic with these networks.
Also consider the other factors like, are all the network providers you want to connect to in the same datacentre/on-site? If not, you need to consider addon costs like wave/transport to get to the network from the other datacentre.
Next, do you want to have just 1 upstream? or multiple? consider the cross-connect costs at places like Equinix/CoreSite/DigitalReality etc which itself are $350+/month each..
T1s will be your cheapest options often as they are on-site at most datacentres allowing you to avoid the wave/transport side of things, but you can't avoid the cross-connect costs, so even if you get 1 Gbit/s at $400-500(?)/mo at some T1 provider, adding $350 for the cross-connect brings this up to $750-850/mo right away for the "1st" Gbit at least, now if you're looking at a larger port like 10G, 100G etc, this wouldn't matter as much, but always good to keep in mind when calculating the true cost of the transit/bandwidth.
Mixed calculation, not everyone will use 20TB bandwidth. Large networks on the other hand can get their traffic shifted towards other networks by private peering, which is what @dataforest already said, rather - but not 100% cost neutral. What most forget: It's not about the bandwidth alone, there's a few more factors which drive expenses. Those include darkfiber, transport equipment (can be easily 6 figures), routers, ddos-protection and most importantly, people who do on-call duty to take care of all the infrastructure running 24x7.
From our side, we're heavily investing into network capacity to operate well also when one network route goes down - which is more than just buying a few transceivers, still allowing for a decent overall pricing
$7
Good question
£6.99 Per TB
three fiddy
how much is the difference in price between 1gbps and 10gbps? Let's say in NL/DE/US
Larger providers have lower bandwidth costs because they can pass on costs through IX
Generally, providers follow this pricing structure:
Although, if you know the right people, you can get it for much lower (psst @BackboneDirect )
Our Cost:
In USD:
Basically, if you want decent bandwidth pricing, go with US/CA/EU. If you hate money, drop 100G in AU/NZ/SG.
Depends on carrier/blend. Lowest cost 10G will be HE, Cogent, and GTT (maybe more-so with a commit). Medium is going to be your NTT, Arelion, PCCW, etc. And at the higher end basically Lumen (until you get the ACDR up there, then they will play ball).
Different universe? CM/CT/CU
2.5PB € 400.00(from their site)This means 1tb costs 0.16$/m, 1.92/y
Interesting
If you have a 100Gbps commit around €4000 it'd be around €0.12/TB.
Bandwidth prices per TB overall depend on how much 95/5 bandwidth you've committed to.
It depends on the location, the negotiated price for the p95 megabyte, whether it is protected or not...
In Brazil, I can get 100 GB of IX.BR (the largest IX in the world, to connect to Google/Cloudflare/others) for $600 per month + cross-connect cost (about $100). For a carrier, the cost per megabyte is $0.50 - 1 less than 1 Gbps on a 10 Gbps port.
This data is for Brazil/South America, where traffic is more expensive than US/Europe, but much cheaper than Asia/Africa.
Cogent, NTT and HE are globally standardized, but the quality in South America is not as good as EdgeUno, DataPacket etc.
Hetzner probably pays too little for the 20 TB. On PeeringDB, you can see that they have several terabytes of IX, which probably reduces the carrier's bill by 50%
https://www.peeringdb.com/asn/24940
We’ve been reselling Leaseweb infra for over 15 years now, so I’ve seen the bandwidth pricing landscape change quite a bit.
Back in the day, we used to pay around €400/month for just 100 Mbps unmetered — and that was considered decent at the time!
These days, bandwidth is way cheaper.
If we’re talking about pure IP Transit, pricing usually falls somewhere between €2,500 to €10,000 per 100 Gbps, depending on your blend.
If you’re using budget providers like Cogent or Hurricane Electric, you’ll be on the lower end.
Premium options like Lumen or Deutsche Telekom ? Expect to pay more.
On average, big guys like OVH, Hetzner, or even Leaseweb pay around €2.5k to €3k per 100 Gbps commit. And most transit providers offer a 1:10 commit ratio on 95th percentile billing.
So, for example, you can have a 1 Tbps Network Capacity, but only pay for 100 Gbps if that’s your 95th percentile usage.
That comes down to around €25 per Gbps or €250 per 10 Gbps of actual billed usage — not peak, but 95% usage.
So if you spike to 100 Gbps briefly, but mostly hover around 10 Gbps, you’re only billed for 10 Gbps.
You can reduce costs even more if you’re clever with overselling your bandwidth.
Of course, there are other costs involved like your network gear (switches, optics, NICs etc.) and engineering/management overhead.
For context, someone with a 500 Gbps to 1 Tbps-sized network usually ends up paying around €4k–€5k per 100 Gbps, depending on negotiation skills and the providers in the mix.
This is mostly for Europe/US markets — APAC is a whole different story.
Do direct peers with CM/CT/CU cost much more than T1 carriers (for example Cogent, Arelion, etc.)?
Yes. cost much more. For CM/CU/CT, premium bandwidth usually costs $6/Mbps (US) or even higher $60/Mbps (APAC)
Big providers like Hetzner get cheap bulk bandwidth, so they can offer more. Small providers get fixed limits and pay extra if they use more. Generally, shared hosting gives unlimited bandwidth, and basic VPS plans come with around 2TB.