[asterisk-biz] Colocation and Bandwidth in HK

[Andy Davidson]

On 21 May 2008, at 22:11, Miles Scruggs wrote:

> I'm not sure what country you are comparing your bandwidth prices  
> to, but you can buy high quality transit from Tier 1 providers for  
> $15/Mb.

It's often more complicated that just which country the carrier is  
offering pricing in.  On the supply side, there are several factors  
which will affect your *individual* offer of pricing for bandwidth,  
such as

  - Ease of delivery -- (long lined circuit to your office, vs.  
Ethernet presentation to your colo in carrier hotel -- basically  
mitigating the costs of transport)
  - LEVEL OF COMMIT (Big one -- cost per Mbit if the customer commits  
to 20Mb/s will be vastly different to that which will be offered for a  
100Mb/s or 500Mb/s commit -- and in fact it may be cheaper to ask for  
a huge commit to get pricing into the lowest possible band, and just  
use a fragment of the capacity).
  - Existing density of deployed ports in pop.
  - Presentation technology (port speed, technology)
  - Likely traffic profile of customer (how much transport required,  
how much can be locally peered off for free)
  - Reputation of carrier.  Reputation of customer.
  - Account managers' mood

On the demand side, there are usual factors that periodically affect  
pricing, but since every single carrier will give you a different skew  
to the routing table, and therefore vastly different performance to  
the destinations you care about, you may be left in a situation where  
your option to pick and choose between carriers is limited to the  
extent that this has an upward effect on pricing.

With some creative thinking about how to approach effective routing,  
redundancy and such, e.g. the use of partial routes products and SFI  
to other local carriers, it is possible to build a superb IP network  
in a major carrier hotel at a fraction of the price mentioned by Mike  
at the top of this email.

This is the sort of thing I like to talk about and help with -- please  
ping me off list if you want to talk more.

Best wishes
Andy Davidson
www.devonshire.it