The circuit you priced competitively three years ago is very unlikely to still be priced competitively today — not because anyone acted in bad faith, but because of how these contracts are structured and how busy you are.
How the drift happens
Three things compound:
- Auto-renewal. Many business contracts roll over automatically unless you give notice in a specific window, often 30 to 90 days before term end. Miss it and you are committed for another term.
- The market moved. Bandwidth prices generally fall over time and carrier footprints expand. A building that had one lit carrier when you signed may have three now.
- Nobody owns it. Internet is infrastructure. It works, so it does not appear on anyone's list until it breaks or someone audits the spend.
The renewal offer is not the market
When a renewal quote arrives, it is priced against your inertia, not against what a competing carrier would bid for your building today. It may be perfectly reasonable. It may also be well above what the same circuit would cost if three networks were asked to bid on it this week. You cannot tell from the document itself.
What to do instead
- Find your term end date and the notice window. Put both in a calendar with a reminder 120 days ahead.
- Re-qualify the address before that window opens. Availability may have changed since you last looked.
- Get competing numbers for the same speed and term, so the comparison is real.
- Take the renewal if it wins. Sometimes it does, and switching has real costs in cutover risk and effort.
If we re-price your address and your existing contract genuinely wins, we will tell you so and set a reminder to look again at the next renewal. That is not generosity; it is how a one-agent shop keeps clients for a decade.
The cheapest hour you will spend
Auditing a renewal takes very little of your time when someone else does the qualification work. The downside is an hour. The upside is every month of the next term.
