A cross connect is a piece of cable. That is it.
It runs from your gear to someone else's inside the same building. A patch panel, a fiber run, maybe 50 feet of it. And Equinix charges you around 375 dollars a month for that cable.
The cable does not cost 375 dollars a month. Not even close. The install is a one time job. After that, the fiber just sits there. There is no metered usage. No bandwidth cap. Nothing turns on or off. You pay the same whether you push 10 gigabits through it or nothing at all.
So why the price? Because they can charge it. You are already in the building. Your gear is racked. Moving out is expensive and slow. That is the whole game.
Where the fee comes from
Equinix makes real money two ways. Space and power is one. Interconnection is the other. Cross connects fall in the second bucket. And that bucket carries the fattest margin in the business.
A single cross connect runs about 375 dollars a month at list. Multiply that across a large deployment and it adds up fast. Some customers carry dozens of them. A few carry hundreds. Each one is near total margin once the fiber is run.
The install is a separate charge. Usually a few hundred dollars, one time. That part is fair. It covers the tech and the patch work. The monthly recurring charge is the part worth fighting.
Why nobody questions it
Cross connect fees hide in plain sight. They are small next to your power bill. They feel like a cost of doing business. So the network team pays them and moves on.
But they stack. Ten cross connects at 375 dollars is 3,750 dollars a month. That is 45,000 dollars a year for cable that was installed once. Now you are paying attention.
The other reason nobody fights: the fee looks fixed. It shows on the invoice as a flat line. No usage, no tiers, no obvious lever. People assume flat means final. It is not.
How to bring it down
Start with an audit. Pull your interconnection list. Match every cross connect to a live circuit. In big deployments, some of them are dead. The circuit got turned down years ago and the cross connect kept billing. Cancel the dead ones. That is free money.
Next, look at volume. If you carry a lot of cross connects, you have leverage most people never use. Equinix will discount at scale. They do not advertise it. You have to ask, and you have to ask with a number in hand.
Timing matters too. Carriers and colo providers both write contracts so renewals catch you off guard. The window to negotiate is usually 90 days before your term ends. Miss it and you roll into another year at list. Put the date in your calendar the day you sign.
Consolidation is the deeper play. If you have gear scattered across cages, every hop is a cross connect. Pull your footprint tighter and you cut the count. Fewer cables, lower bill. This takes engineering work, but the savings are permanent.
What fair looks like
There is no such thing as a fair 375 dollar cable. But there is a fair discount. At volume, we have seen the per port rate come down hard when a customer walks in with an audit and a renewal clock. The provider has room to move. They almost always do.
The problem is you do not know what fair looks like. You see one line item and assume it is set. It is not. Every one of those charges is a starting number, not a final one.
Pull your interconnection list this week. Count the cross connects. Match them to live circuits. You will find at least one you can kill.
Upload your bill. We will pull every cross connect, flag the dead ones, and tell you what your interconnection spend should actually look like.
Related reading
→ See a sample bill analysis → How to read a colocation invoice → Data center markets and pricing → Cutting interconnection costs at scale