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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