Ask three companies on the same street what they pay for the same internet circuit and you’ll often get three very different answers. Same speed, same provider footprint, wildly different bills. Nobody got scammed — they just signed at different times, with different leverage, and never went back to check.

That’s the uncomfortable truth about bandwidth pricing: there’s no sticker price. What you pay is a function of when you signed, how hard anyone pushed, and whether your rate has been touched since. Which means the only way to know if you’re overpaying is to benchmark — to hold your number up against what the market actually charges today.

This guide won’t hand you a single magic figure, because an honest one doesn’t exist. What it will do is show you what drives the number, so you can judge your own rate with clear eyes.

Why there’s no simple answer

Bandwidth isn’t one product. The same “100 Mbps” can mean very different things — and cost very different amounts — depending on what’s underneath it.

The biggest driver is the type of connection. A dedicated fiber circuit with a guaranteed speed and an uptime commitment is a fundamentally different product from a shared broadband connection that’s “up to” a speed and makes no promises. The first costs more because you’re paying for certainty: symmetrical speed, guaranteed performance, and a service-level agreement that puts the provider on the hook. The second is cheaper because you’re sharing capacity and carrying the risk yourself. Comparing the two on price alone is like comparing a reserved seat to standby.

Location matters just as much. A circuit in a dense metro with lots of competing providers prices very differently from the same circuit to a rural site where one carrier owns the only path in. Your address quietly sets your ceiling.

And then there’s time. Bandwidth has gotten cheaper, fairly steadily, as capacity expands. A rate that was competitive when you signed a three-year deal can look expensive by the time that deal is halfway through — not because anyone raised it, but because the market moved underneath it and your contract didn’t.

Before you decide your rate is too high, separate the connection from everything bundled around it. Your telecom spend usually includes more than raw bandwidth:

What you’re really paying for

The circuit itself — the connectivity. The service level — whether you’re paying for guarantees and priority support or just best-effort. The equipment — routers and managed hardware that may be baked into the monthly cost. And the management — whether someone is monitoring, maintaining, and troubleshooting the connection for you, or whether that’s on your team.

This matters because a “cheaper” quote often wins by quietly removing things you actually need. A lower number with no uptime guarantee, no managed support, and no priority restoration isn’t a better deal — it’s a different, smaller product. Benchmarking only works when you’re comparing like for like.

How to tell if your rate is stale

You don’t need a market report to get a useful first read. A few signals tell you whether it’s worth a closer look:

How long ago did you sign? If your current rate is more than a couple of years old and hasn’t been renegotiated since, the odds that it still reflects current pricing are low. Time alone is the strongest predictor of a stale rate.

Has the price only ever gone up? Many agreements include annual escalators — small, automatic increases written into the contract. If your bill has crept upward every year while market rates drifted down, the gap between what you pay and what’s available has been widening quietly the whole time.

Are you paying the same per-megabit at every site? Pricing should vary by location and competition. If every site is priced identically, that’s often a sign the rates were set once, for convenience, and never optimized.

Do you actually know your number? Plenty of organizations can’t state their per-megabit cost without digging. If you can’t either, that’s not a failing — it’s just the gap that benchmarking exists to close.

What to do with a benchmark

Say you do the comparison and find your rates are competitive. That’s a real result, not a wasted exercise — you’ve confirmed you’re getting fair value and you can stop wondering. Confidence is worth something.

But if the comparison shows daylight between what you pay and what the market offers, you now have something far more useful than a complaint: a specific, defensible number to bring into your next renewal. “I think this is too expensive” gets you nowhere with a carrier. “Here’s the current market rate for this exact circuit type at this location” changes the conversation entirely. Benchmarking turns a vague sense of overpaying into leverage you can actually use.

The timing point matters too. If you benchmark now, in the back half of the year, you’re prepared for any renewal that lands before December — and you’re walking in early and informed instead of scrambling against a notification deadline. (How you fund all of this — owning equipment versus subscribing to it — is its own decision worth weighing deliberately, which is exactly the capex versus opex trade-off we looked at recently.)

The honest catch is that good benchmarking takes access most companies don’t have — current pricing across many carriers, for many circuit types, in many locations. That visibility across the whole market is precisely what a vendor-neutral advisor brings to the table, with no incentive to land you on any particular carrier.

If you’ve never checked your bandwidth rates against today’s market, a risk-free telecom audit is the cleanest way to find out where you stand — and it starts by establishing exactly the number this guide has been asking you about. Not sure what you’re even paying across all your sites? Start with the mid-year audit checklist.

At Sandler Partners, we help organizations evaluate their current telecom and technology environment with one goal: making sure they are paying for the right solutions, with the right providers, under the right terms.

Because we are carrier-neutral and work with 250+ providers, the recommendation is not based on pushing one specific carrier or platform.

The right answer depends on the organization. But the process should always create clarity.

A Telecom Audit Is a Smart Place to Start. Schedule yours now.