Ten Orders of Magnitude of Bandwidth Cost

(formerly Nine Orders of Magnitude of Bandwidth Cost)

Crowdsourcing bandwidth cost data since 2002

This page illustrates the huge differences in price between different types of Internet access, as well as some other data communication services. We do this by converting the price of each service into a common measure of U.S. dollars per megabyte and plotting them as a bar graph with a logarithmic scale.

Without further ado, here's the graph:

 
Click on a bar for more information
 Sony Nuro, Japan, 2013  
 M1 Fibre 100 mbps 2 year promotion, Singapore, 2013  
 Nippon Telegraph and Telephone Corp 100 Mbps broadband, Japan, 2006  
 Hetzner Online colocation excess traffic, Germany, 2016  
 Yahoo 12 Mbps broadband, Japan, 2003  
 Sonera ADSL 24/1 Mbit/s, Finland, 2009  
 Saunalahti Tuplalaajakaista 10+Nopsa, Finland, 2012  
 Cox Cable, United States, 2003  
 BD-R via US First Class International rate, United States, 2012  
 Welho Pro cable internet, Finland, 2003  
 Telmex Infinitum, Mexico, 2009  
 1 Gbps transit, United States, 2005  
 Free.fr ADSL, France, 2004  
 SBC PacBell DSL 1.5 Mbps, United States, 2002  
 DNA Nettikaista 384 mobile broadband, Finland, 2009  
 Megapath SDSL, United States, 2004  
 Amazon EC2 outgoing transfer, first 10 TB/month, United States, 2008  
 Netissimo, France, 2004  
 1 Mbps transit, United States, 2005  
 Zen Active ADSL, United Kingdom, 2013  
 Proposed Hungarian Internet tax, Hungary, 2014  
 CD-R by first-class US mail, United States, 2002  
 Amnet 256K DSL, Costa Rica, 2002  
 meer.net SDSL, United States, 2003  
 Sonera Sopiva Pro 4G excess traffic charge, Finland, 2014  
 Donobi 100Mbps personal access, United States, 2003  
 East Buchanan Telephone Cooperative (EBTC) 5 GB tier, United States, 2014  
 EE 4G petabyte bundle, United Kingdom, 2013  
 MTV3 ISDN dialup, Finland, 2003  
 prepaidsimcard.org 1GB data-only SIM, United Kingdom, 2013  
 Islandssimi DSL, Iceland, 2003  
 EU mobile broadband roaming price cap, 2014  
 EU mobile broadband roaming price cap, 2009  
 Sonera GSM cellular data calling plan, Finland, 2000  
 T-Mobile GPRS, United States, 2003  
 AT&T Terrestar satellite data service, United States, 2010  
 Sonera GPRS Basic, Finland, 2003  
 T-Mobile cellular data, United States, 2002  
 O2 Loop Prepaid GPRS, Germany, 2005  
 AT&T international data roaming, 2007  
 AT&T international GPRS data roaming rate, United States, 2010  
 T-Mobile XtraData GPRS, Germany, 2005  
 At-sea email via InmarSat (via analog modem), 2003  
 Sonera GSM Short Message Service, Finland, 2000  
 MySatMail.com Basic Service Plan, 2009  
 
  $0.01 $0.10 $1 $10 per kilobyte
  $0.01 $0.10 $1 $10 $100 $1000 $10000 per megabyte
  $0.01 $0.10 $1 $10 $100 $1000 $10000 per gigabyte
  $0.10 $1 $10 $100 $1000 $10000 per terabyte
 

The difference in price between the lowest-cost and the highest-cost services is more than ten orders of magnitude; in other words, the cost per bit of the most expensive service is more than ten billion times that of the least expensive one.


Add your own bandwidth cost to the graph

We'd like to extend the graph with more types of connections and with more up-to-date information. By adding your own bandwidth cost, you can see how it compares to the existing entries, and help us build a more comprehensive database.

If you add a new entry it will initially be displayed only to you, highlighted in red in the graph above. The submission will then be reviewed by a human, and if approved, made visible to all viewers.

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