Equinix were a leader in bringing this to the UK, they have said they want to get the UK charges to US levels (so >10x increase still to come). US pricing already matches metro waves so we face paying twice the cost of the wave to the DCs for the short interconnects.
Our Internap (reselling Equinix) xconnects at Equinix in Ashburn recently jumped from $250 MRC to $350 overnight. According to the Equinix account manager, their "standard" increase is only 5% p.a. In my experience, US facility MRC's are (generally) always x times more expensive than European equivalent, if there is even an MRC although maybe that is changing as others have mentioned. I guess you could also draw somewhat similar comparisons with IX business models between the US and Europe (commercial vs mutual).
They started charging but I can't attribute the growing empty rack space to that, more likely AWS is the cause of that and a driver for increasing xcon fees to make up revenue.
brandon
Agreed. This is a topic worthy of discussion all on its own! Wonder how much of colo/DC operator space and revenue public cloud is eating in 2018? Regards, Andrew.