The last time I had to care professionally about bandwidth pricing for CDN price optimization in the US, wholesale bandwidth pricing was following a pattern sim

The last time I had to care professionally about bandwidth pricing for CDN price optimization in the US, wholesale bandwidth pricing was following a pattern similar to Moore’s law, with either bandwidth doubling, or price halving every 18-21 months. This was partly why you could get what looked like good deals from CDN providers for multi year contracts. They knew their prices were just going to fall. Part of what drives this is that we keep finding ways to utilize fiber, so there’s a technical aspect, but a lot of it also comes down to adding more physical connections. There’s even network consolidation happening where 2 companies will do enough data sharing that they will get peering agreements and just add a cat6 patch between servers hosted in the same datacenter and short circuit the network. It’s been almost a decade so it’s possible things have slowed considerably, or demand has outstripped supply, but given how much data steam seems to be willing to throw at me, I know pricing is likely no where near what it was last I looked (it’s the only metered thing I regularly see and it’s downloading 10’s of GB daily for a couple games in my collection). Using egress pricing is also the wrong metric. You’d be better off looking at data costs between regions/datacenters to get a better idea about wholesale costs, since high egress costs is likely a form of vender lockin, while higher looking at cross region avoids any “free” data costs through patch cables skewing the numbers. Not sure about bandwidth between countries, there’s different economics there. I’d expect some self similarity there, but laying trunks might be so costly that short of finding ways to utilize fiber better is the only real way to increase supply.