Sector · 23.5% of the indexinteractive version →
Communications.
Wholesale IP transit, per Mbps per month (the input layer, not your broadband bill).
-99.994%
since 1998
-30.31%/yr
annual rate
$100
buys: ≈186 TB moved
Then: Moving a month of traffic at 1 Mbps cost $1,200 in 1998.
Now: Seven cents.
The market price of reaching the entire internet, surveyed since 1998. A seventeen-thousand-fold decline — and a market that did not exist in 1990, so the series honestly starts when it did.
The series, year by year
| Year | Communications | CPI-U |
|---|---|---|
| 1990 | — | 100.0 |
| 1991 | — | 105.4 |
| 1992 | — | 109.8 |
| 1993 | — | 113.1 |
| 1994 | — | 116.1 |
| 1995 | — | 119.3 |
| 1996 | — | 121.9 |
| 1997 | — | 124.7 |
| 1998 | 100.0 | 128.0 |
| 1999 | 75.00 | 132.4 |
| 2000 | 56.25 | 136.0 |
| 2001 | 30.62 | 138.9 |
| 2002 | 16.67 | 141.1 |
| 2003 | 11.18 | 143.3 |
| 2004 | 7.50 | 143.4 |
| 2005 | 5.59 | 144.4 |
| 2006 | 4.17 | 146.3 |
| 2007 | 2.04 | 149.3 |
| 2008 | 1.00 | 152.9 |
| 2009 | 0.645 | 155.7 |
| 2010 | 0.417 | 159.3 |
| 2011 | 0.285 | 161.2 |
| 2012 | 0.195 | 163.5 |
| 2013 | 0.126 | 165.9 |
| 2014 | 0.0813 | 168.6 |
| 2015 | 0.0525 | 175.5 |
| 2016 | 0.0398 | 181.5 |
| 2017 | 0.0301 | 187.3 |
| 2018 | 0.0228 | 192.7 |
| 2019 | 0.0173 | 197.3 |
| 2020 | 0.0131 | 201.5 |
| 2021 | 0.00990 | 210.9 |
| 2022 | 0.00750 | 227.8 |
| 2023 | 0.00690 | 237.1 |
| 2024 | 0.00634 | 243.5 |
| 2025 | 0.00583 | 250.1 |
Sources
DrPeering (Norton) · TeleGeography. Every datapoint's provenance and verification status is public in the anchor ledger on GitHub.