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Cheap(ish) Bandwidth Coming to Hong Kong
randvegeta
Member, Host Rep
Seems that there is some competition building up in HK. Carriers are dropping prices to levels normally seen in Europe and North America.
Cogent and HE.net are priced at the bottom, with bandwidth prices below US$3 /mbit. But both have poor networks in Asia, and this has meant many of the other Asian carriers have not needed to drop their prices, and commanded prices of US$15 - $100 /mbit as a result.
Telstra on the other hand, owner of Pacnet, have a well developed Asian network. They are now offering, excluding Direct China bandwidth, bandwidth below US$4 /mbit! Now other carriers are following suit, offering reduced prices if excluding direct China bandwidth.
Okay, so if you are targeting China, it's not very helpful, but in general, for the rest of Asia, it looks to be a good deal, and this could translate to more affordable hosting in the Asia region!
Yes I know you can get stupid cheap bandwidth in the US and EU, but these prices are not that far off from normal prices in the west. It also means servers with 10TB + traffic will actually be a reasonable and affordable reality.
Anyone find this interesting or appealing?
Comments
Hang on, someone praising a Telstra? Gee, they get dissed for being money hungry whores pretty hard at home.
How does this compare to prices in Singapore? There we have a dozen of low-end providers, and it's easy to get a gigabit uplink VPS with 1-2 TB bandwidth for $5 or so. It was unfortunate that Hong Kong was lagging behind in this area, hopefully now it catches up.
Very interesting, I used to sell HK VPS's and softlayer was the only decent provider I could easily find who were doing 20TB as standard with free incoming.
Aren't these LowEndProviders (who partiticipate here) either sitting on AS18106 (eg: Safehousecloud) or AS38001 (eg: Dediserve)?
From what I heard, AS38001 has rather cheap routes and often changes its routes to places like CN.
AS133165 does this $5 thing from buying bandwidth and peering with ISPs here at IXes and buying transit though, which makes sense, plus they run on VC money.
Assuming its some legit hardcore overselling, though for $5/mth I've been able to push multiple TBs on DigitalOcean (that doesn't cap), without getting into any trouble.
It would be more appealing if unmetered is around the same level, as the fact all local HK bandwidth providers, no matter residential or commercial, is advertising and indeed providing unmetered and semi-dedicated ports, with 100Mbps speed at least.
The prices for bandwidth in Asia - even in Singapore is still very high. We buy larger amounts in SG, US and Germany and it's still abou 6x more expensive in SG even if we have a very good partner. But will add more uplinks in the near future. And the price talks are much easier than in the past. So you can feel a price drop is on the go. But not sure if we ever see the pricing as in Europe or US. The question is if this pricing is even healthy or not.
And btw with us no one gets in trouble because of multiple TB downloads. We even host VLCs local mirror for free. But yes we and no one else can give a 1 Gbit dedicated uplink for each virtual server for 5 USD.
I have never found SG to have any significant difference in price for bandwidth compared to HK. HK and SG, to my knowledge, have always been quite similar in terms of bandwidth pricing. If anything, HK should have a slight advantage.
If you look at the cheapest carriers, HK and SG have always had the same providers. Cogent and HE.net for example have both operated in both countries for some time and prices were about the same. Pacnet, PCCW and HGC are big regional players and are all based in HK, so there is no reason for these to be any cheaper in SG than HK.
My guess is that SG never had great connectivity to China (at least not compared to HK hosts) and that makes a big difference to the price.
If we look at HE.net and Cogent, both operating in many countries (and so easier to compare price), we have quotes from them in both HK and LT. In LT, the ON-Net price is about 0.6-0.8 per Mbit on 1G commits (excluding local loops/xconn fees) and in HK it's about $1.95. Presumably pricing in LT is similar to other parts of Europe and North America. So price are 2.5 - 3x more in HK, and at such levels, it doesn't seem like that big a deal any more.
Let's also remember I'm talking about transit prices. Hosts almost always oversell. 1G for $5 is impossible, and no one is really offering that. It's seems to be a universal truth.
Softlayer had deep pocks and large capacity, but even they are very oversold and I believe have cut their Direct China routes for this reason. So it's hard to compare.
We're probably going to sign up for both 1G at Telstra and Cogent and the chances are we too will offer 1G 'unmetered' servers. Even though we only have 2G to give, most servers barely use 10M, if that.
I don't think you even read what I wrote. Nobody said 1G unmetered for $5. However 1-2TB per month on a shared 1Gbps uplink for $5 is very much possible and is being done by many hosts -- in SG, but for some reason few in Hong Kong. Maybe because people there, like you just demonstrated, don't really understand the transfer limits, and would rather give everyone a "dedicated" 2 Mbps pipe?
@rm_ , 1-2TB = 3-6Mbit. Impossible to do without overselling in HK and even SG unless its mostly local bandwidth.
Even at $2 /mbit, which is pretty much EU pricing, $5 doesnt pay for it. Did YOU even read what I wrote? Maybe you dont understand transfer limits?
In HK it's hard for this price. But in SG it's possible - without overselling the line.
It is true for China Unicom depends on the destination location within China. So far I've found 5 different kinds of routing including NTT, TeliaSonera and SingTel.
To China Mobile it always routes via HKIX(For China Mobile users try DigitalOcean SG) and it doesn't have China Telecom direct by default.
AS18106 seems that have some routing issues with all 3 telecom in China. You will NOT want to use AS18106 currently when talk about China direct
That's true we currently in the process to heavily increase the routing with China and even adding some private peerings with local China carriers soon.
The following issues happen in AS18016
AS4837>>AS18106 via TATA Comunication US west
AS18106>>AS4837 via SingTel or StarHub
Latency constantly at 300ms
AS9808 >> AS18106 via HKIX then SingTel
AS18106 >> AS9808 via any2ix US west
Latency around 240ms
even worth than DigitalOcean SG
That are some of the routes we are currently workin on.
Yes, OF COURSE with overselling, because not everyone will use their entire 1TB (far far from everyone).
Well I was talking about bandwidth prices in the beggining of this thread and I have yet to see SG providers offering transit at significanrly different (let alone lower) prices than HK. And this has been true for at least a decade.
So how exactly have HK lagged behind? Because hosts dont oversell to the same extent as SG? That is somehow indicitive of being behind?
As I have already explained, the big cost of bandwidth in HK is China bw so if companies were giving out 1 - 2TB traffic, if even 2% were used for China bound, it's unsustainable. Maybe thats why HK hosts dont offer massivly oversold traffic allowances.
Telstra can be eh to many locations (outside of China being China), the IXs (eg. Most Indians are on HKIX now) are fine and most transit Asia and EU bound is usable even for higher traffic amounts, for 5-10$ depending on country (they have more POPs than HK and SG...) if not Australia solid and CDR seemingly rather guaranteed (some transit ports in HK/Asia are oversold x23+, i.e. a full Gbit switch with a single Gbit uplink, 23 downstreams at 100-1000Mbit CDR/Burst).
(edit times out for some reason)
(all USD)
I'm not sure where you are looking but "oversold" is also standard in HK, eg. 10Mbit on 100$ servers (Sunnyvision) or "unmetered" with few Gbit local (ServerHK and alike, HKBN as backbone), then there is like HKTI with "unmetered" as default and the quality options much like you (starting 20$ for 100Mbit "broadband" business to 150$ per Mbit DC)... Dataplugs has 10Mbit and a crap server for 75$ and that even includes (ultra crappy) "Asian China"...
@William,
Of course bandwidth is 'oversold' in Hong Kong. It's oversold big time! But then again it depends on the routes taken. 10Mbit local is practically free, so it could be claimed that it's not oversold.
In the case of DataPlugs (they are SCUM by the way!), they claim 'DEDICATED International'. What they are doing is not 'overselling'. What they are doing is just plain and simple fraud! Well that is unless of course they really ARE giving 10Mbit dedicated, in which case the bandwidth quality would probably be pretty poor.
You can't oversell 'dedicated' bandwidth. That's the point of being 'dedicated'. If it's oversold, its not dedicated, and calling it dedicated is wrong and fraudulent. Considering DataPlugs don't have Cogent or HE.net, I am quite certain they are not really offering 10M dedicated international.
Sort of, "dedicated" is hard to verify in Asia and hard to press also against the ISP, either by legal system, their size or their affiliation (CNC can't give more than one shit about a CN link only getting 5Mbit of 25Mbit CDR... sadly they don't have to expect problems either).
Sunnyvision is far from legit either, at least BW wise (the DC is meh, but cheap), never heard much about Dataplugs but sounds like mostly China targeted.