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MrBandwidth -
You're correct in that you won't see anything near rock-bottom pricing from published pricing. I think verio has 45mbit published at $11k ;) I guarantee I can get it for far, far, less than that.
You won't be able to get worldcom, or sprint, or even att bandwidth for super-cheap, but that doesn't mean those companies are more financially viable. Worldcom carries the majority of all internet traffic, and charges a pretty penny for it. Look at their financial situation.
However, there are far more Tier1 (transitless) providers than just the huge ones you hear about. Transitless providers can sell for uber-cheap since adding more bandwidth utilization doesn't directly cost them money. It only costs them in infrastructure upgrades, no bill to their transit providers or anything. Essentially, adding a couple hundred meg to their network is "free" to them, since they won't notice it.
Kimmykim makes a good point earlier in the thread though. How valuable your business is to your upstream(s). For this reason, we buy from a semi-smallish national backbone, where we personally know a lot of the engineering staff, and our also one of their larger customers. We're still fully redundant, and we willl be adding more transit links to other providers as our usage justifies it.
I guess the point I'm trying to make is the bandwidth market has changed a lot. And their are hosts that are just interested in hosting your sites and that's it, and there are hosts that are interested in building their own network and systems so they can control the service they offer to you better. Neither is inherently better than the other, but they both have advantages and disadvantages. We're attempting the latter, slowly growing and such, but it does get frusterating to see newcomers come in, and just seemingly be a magnet for new customers just based on slightly lower pricing and a string of BS coming from them. Shrug.
I do agree cogent needs to go out of business, I think that happening will seperate the men from the boys so to speak, and cogent has done far more harm to the hosting market than good. Lowering pricing is good, but doing it below cost only harms those companies that are planning to be around long-term, and also opens the door for a lot of scam artists out to make a quick buck while the fad lasts.
peace,
-Phil
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