CDN Pricing From 2005 Shows The Rapid Decline In Bandwidth Costs

While going through some of my old files, I came across a bunch of my pricing data from 2005. This was around the time I started collecting CDN pricing a couple of times a year and the charts below show pricing from the market in 2005 based on per MB sustained, per GB delivered and includes pricing on storage as well.

While no one who follows the space will be shocked to see just how far pricing has dropped over the past five years, it's also funny to look at the buckets of volume that were being priced back then and what was considered to be a large volume customer, compared to today.

 

But if you think these prices are crazy, just look at what the going rate was in the industry in 1999 for a live webcast. Below is what InterVU's list price was at the time for a webcast at 56Kbps. To put these numbers in perspective, the $95K cost to do a 4 hour webcast to 25,000 simultaneous users today would cost on average about $1,500.

Comments

[Kevin]

Those per Meg prices from 2005 don't really look that bad for the time. Of course it's hard to remember prices from 4 years ago, but I want to say that $100/meg was pretty common on transit pricing at about the 100 meg commit level. Again, though prices have dropped so fast that my memory of prices could easily be a year or two off and then there is no comparison.

I wonder how much bandwidth price reductions really help the CDN's at this point since most of the traffic from the major CDN's is directly connected to the end network so they are not paying for transit anyway most of the time. I'd think improvements in Hardware and higher price drops is really where the CDN's get a benefit these days. (software of course too)

[Douglas Galbi]

Your "Vendor List Prices for Throughput - Industry Average (2005)" seems to me to require time dimensions. Are these prices per month per megaBIT per second (rather than megaBYTE per second) of allocated throughput bandwidth?

[Dan Rayburn]

Hi Doug, yes, throughput means per second.