New volume pricing for Amazon’s CloudFront CDN takes effect today, February 1st. For US and Europe “edge” delivery, the price goes as low as $0.05/GB at the 1000+ TB level. For Hong Kong, it’s $0.09/GB at that level. For Japan, $0.095/GB. The pricing isn’t quite comparable to a traditional CDN because of the origin bandwidth fees and the per-request fee, but it’s still a useful benchmark.

For those who are mentally comparing this to the cost of bandwidth, those per-GB costs translate into $16/Mbps for US/Europe, and $29/Mbps for Asia. In a day and age when Cogent is splashing “Home of the $4 Megabit” across its home page, it might look like there’s still quite a bit of delta between bandwidth pricing and CDN pricing, but especially once you get out of the US, bandwidth costs escalate pretty dramatically beyond Cogent’s low-water-mark.

Nonetheless, Amazon’s volume pricing play ought to put to an end anyone’s hope that the elimination of some of the financially weaker CDN players is going to do anything significant to alleviate pricing pressure where it’s most severe — the entirely commoditized portion of the market. In fact, this explicit, transparent pricing is probably going to provide a nice bargaining chip. Even if a major media conglomerate isn’t going to use Amazon to deliver their video, it won’t stop its purchasing people from using these published prices to hammer CDNs during negotiations.