The price of good real estate downtown is astronomical. Why should bandwidth be cheap? It's for the same reason that real estate is expensive: density.
Think of real estate as being a pie. There's only so much of it and the choice pieces command a premium. The more people that want to grab a slice, the higher the price goes.
Now consider bandwidth. The more people who want a slice of bandwidth, the cheaper it gets. That's because the high cost of business bandwidth lies in the capital expense (capex) that it takes to dig tranches, pull wires and fiber optic bundles, and install electronic racks to manage the signals at both ends. With fiber optic, especially, it costs little more to pull a hundred fibers at once as it does to install a single strand.
Once the capital investment has been made, the incremental cost of electronically transferring data from point to point or to the Internet is relatively small. With lots and lots of clients to amortize the buildout costs, providers can afford to offer reduced prices in areas of high business population density.
A related reason for better bandwidth prices downtown is competition. If you want to catch fish, you go where you know there are lots of fish. If you want to provide voice and data services to business, you go where the businesses are. That's not down the country lane where establishments are few and far between. It's downtown where they are literally stacked on top of each other. What once was the exclusive domain of the telephone companies is now home to dozens of competitive carriers, each hungry to expand their service footprint and client list. Competition leads to lower prices, as providers vie to capture the lion's share of the business.
A third factor is technology. There's a newer last mile delivery technology called Ethernet over Copper or EoC that can provide your business with up to 45 Mbps of Metro Ethernet connectivity at bargain rates. The hitch is that you need to be located within a few miles of a carrier point of presence to qualify. Such high bandwidth signals don't travel far over twisted pair copper wiring. But where they do, you'll get an excellent price per Mbps compared to other service options.
So, is your business located downtown? If so, find the best deals on business bandwidth services through a simple online query.
Are you farther out in the burbs or in a small town or rural location? One way you can also get excellent rates on bandwidth services is to colocate your equipment, not your entire business. A T1 line or bonded T1 lines will get you connected from you place of business to the colocation center. Install your servers in the center and you'll have easy access to multiple competitive carriers located in the same facility. Find the best deals on colocation bandwidth and decide for yourself if the cost savings justify a move to where the cheap bandwidth is.
