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> I've occasionally daydreamed about buying a condominium near one of the Seattle Internet Exchange's PoPs, buying a 400 gigabit port, paying to run a fiber pair, arranging for transit, etc etc

For what it's worth, this isn't the same as what the person who wrote the post did. They bought a DIA circuit to an ISP.

What you're seeking is a point-to-point fiber link or MPLS to a panel in KOMO Plaza or the Westin building. You don't need to be near either of those locations to do it and CenturyLink (Lumen, these days) will sell you the circuit but you're not going to like what it costs. We have three of these circuits where I work and they are juuuuust a bit higher than what the article's author says they're paying for the DIA.

(This, along with the eyewatering cross-connect fees that the operators of those two facilities charge, is why getting a SIX port is so expensive on retail colo. You're either paying for the privilege of running some strands of glass or you're paying to use someone's extension switch and the connection they're paying for to get back to the SIX core.)

It really depends on the metro area. Here in Chicago I can get a dark pair about 3 houses down the block from me (never quoted out how much it'd be to extend to my address) going back to 350 Cermak. This ran about $600-1200/mo or so depending on contract terms and who you know. If you have other gear in the facility (e.g. transit and routers with a spare port) you're looking at another $150-350/mo (again, depending on your contract) x-connect to get into your panel in your cage.

Given I have equipment already in the datacenter, it's pretty tempting to pull the trigger on a 100G link. I just have no idea what I'd do with it.

> It really depends on the metro area.

Completely agreed. Seattle and Portland seem to be high on the list of "places telcos think they can take complete advantage of." For what my employer pays for two (locked) racks of colocation here, we could get an entire small suite somewhere like LA or Chicago.

Wireline costs are similarly sky high, I think because CenturyLink has all of the cabling and no one has bothered to dig up the streets to run any more. When we connected a building in Eastlake to our old colo in Tukwila, CenturyLink was the only one who would quote us.

> The only upside is that the pair traveled directly to a CO in the same office park, so we would routinely see 1-2ms pings to anycast IPs like 4.2.2.2, 8.8.8.8, etc

Those are the pings I see on my residential connection, though?

> If that's what you want, this would be the only way to get it.

10Gbps PON is available from AT&T Fiber in some markets, and lower tiers (5Gbps) are coming online from Google Fiber in other markets. In SoCal, I've seen billboards for 10Gbps AT&T Fiber, for example. Obviously you don't get an SLA with a residential connection, though, and I highly doubt that many customers operating at full capacity will be problem-free.

Move to Chatanooga (in Tennessee) instead. Business class (pretty sure with SLA) 10Gbps from EPB for $300/mo, introduced ~2015.