# Do you aware Asia Bandwidth Price Dropping



## hostemo.com (Dec 23, 2013)

Do you aware that asia bandwidth price is dropping? In Singapore and Hongkong, 1Gbps level could get about USD4 - USD5 per mbps.


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## Francisco (Dec 23, 2013)

But from which provider?

If it's HE that's not very good. Last I heard HE's run to Singapore was crazy oversold.

Francisco


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## rds100 (Dec 23, 2013)

It doesn't matter which carrier it is and how badly oversold it is and how much it sucks. It will sooner or later create a different market and will make the other players lower their prices too, even if not to the same levels.


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## Kenshin (Dec 23, 2013)

1G has been at US$5 since early 2013 from tier-1s if you know the right people, it's not surprising. The problem is, how many providers in Asia are using anywhere close to 1G or can sink US$5000/month on bandwidth alone for a new deployment with $0 revenue?

Doesn't help that it's impossible to get proper Asia peering without blending multiple global tier-1s + regional tier-1s. Tata doesn't peer with NTT in HK, only in LAX, Telia/Sparkle peers mainly in US/EU, so hairpinning is normal. HE backhauls everything to LAX, no tier-1 peering in Asia.

Asia routing is just stupid because of all the country incumbents refusing to peer in their own home countries. It's going to cost > US$5000 if you want proper routing, and it matters because customers who are already paying premium (US $0.50/mbps vs Asia $5/mbps) expect the best. I used to like SingTel's blend a lot, US$20/mbps but it's pretty well balanced across Asia if you're just an end user who needs like 50mbps.


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## mojeda (Dec 23, 2013)

rds100 said:


> It doesn't matter which carrier it is and how badly oversold it is and how much it sucks. It will sooner or later create a different market and will make the other players lower their prices too, even if not to the same levels.


I'm not sure how this would be an incentive for others players, if they know they are selling crap bandwidth?


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## Kenshin (Dec 23, 2013)

mojeda said:


> I'm not sure how this would be an incentive for others players, if they know they are selling crap bandwidth?


/me takes Cogent/HE's $x 1G quote to L/N/T, I want 1G at this price

L: GTFO, you can't compare us with them we sell "quality" bandwidth

N: We can do $2x

T: We'll do it at $1.5x

* Waits till end of the year *

/me takes Cogent/HE's $0.8x 1G quote to L3/NTT/Telia, I want 1G at this price

L: We can do $2x

N: We can do $1.2x

T: We'll do $0.8x! Can you sign today?

Market is moving in this direction, prices have plummeted and some tier-1s are touching the budget market pricing already, possibly due to excess bandwidth + loss of sales. The trend for the past year is that network owners have been dropping their expensive providers and blending in or completely switching to budget providers to reduce costs. Case in point, VD is still using pure Cogent (+ their recent saga) but there are enough people who would still buy based on price. On the other hand, CC has added in L3 recently, and I highly doubt they are shelling the big bucks for it to improve their network quality.



Francisco said:


> If it's HE that's not very good. Last I heard HE's run to Singapore was crazy oversold.


HE barely has SG customers from what I can see from their LG (show bgp nei). I'm able to get the max speed of my link too so I don't think it's that bad.


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## Francisco (Dec 23, 2013)

Kenshin said:


> On the other hand, CC has added in L3 recently, and I highly doubt they are shelling the big bucks for it to improve their network quality.
> 
> ...
> 
> HE barely has SG customers from what I can see from their LG (show bgp nei). I'm able to get the max speed of my link too so I don't think it's that bad.


Post CC L3 upgrade we actually had nightly complaints of congestion. I highly doubt they 1:1 their ratio's with that of L3. It's also possible that was part of the gas they used to kick us 

As for HE, my statement is based entirely off their first year in HK. When they originally rolled over there they had a couple (maybe even single) 10gig port. From there they supposedly had it oversold 10x's just to make the pricing work.

Everyone in their dog was buying it because it was only a few bucks per Mbit in Asia.

Francisco


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## Kenshin (Dec 23, 2013)

Francisco said:


> Post CC L3 upgrade we actually had nightly complaints of congestion. I highly doubt they 1:1 their ratio's with that of L3. It's also possible that was part of the gas they used to kick us
> 
> 
> As for HE, my statement is based entirely off their first year in HK. When they originally rolled over there they had a couple (maybe even single) 10gig port. From there they supposedly had it oversold 10x's just to make the pricing work.
> ...


Well, L3 is expensive so, easiest way is to use it as paid peering. Of course tweaking the BGP communities is a whole different story.

I heard the same things about HK, stories about how quite a number of hosting providers picked up HE and their HKIX link is congested. Interestingly I did get talk to Martin Levy from HE earlier this year in Singapore about their single 10G HKIX port and he said it's not congested, and my experience from tests don't show any major issues with HKIX so I don't know, but I believe they only have a single 10G between SG-HK, HK-SJC, SG-JP, JP-LAX. SG enjoys redundancy via HK/JP, but right now I believe they're routing mainly through SG-JP-LAX. I don't think HE has any customers in JP so I guess this works for them.


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## Wintereise (Dec 23, 2013)

They have quite a few clients in JP, we ourselves were one when I was in Japan. Congestion at HKIX was rampant, if anything would even route that way from NRT.

Though, yeah -- everything will get hot potatoe'd to LAX, but it works if that's exactly what you want.


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## hostemo.com (Dec 31, 2013)

We can actually seek for some other tier 2 providers who has those tier 1 upstream. They can give give a very competitive price.

Beside, they could provide some good latency to asia countries.


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## Francisco (Dec 31, 2013)

Wintereise said:


> They have quite a few clients in JP, we ourselves were one when I was in Japan. Congestion at HKIX was rampant, if anything would even route that way from NRT.
> 
> Though, yeah -- everything will get hot potatoe'd to LAX, but it works if that's exactly what you want.


OK so I got my countries mixed up. I knew there was an HE pop that was brutally oversold so I'm guessing it was HK.

Francisco


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