Enterprises moving regulated workloads, databases, and real-time analytics pipelines into the public cloud keep running into the same wall: the public internet is not good enough. Jitter, unpredictable latency, and exposure to DDoS traffic make it a poor fit for trading desks, hospital record systems, or factory floor telemetry that needs to reach a cloud region every few milliseconds. That is the gap AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnect were built to close. As of October 2026, the three services still anchor hybrid cloud networking for most large enterprises, but their pricing models, points of presence, and redundancy requirements differ enough to swing a multi-year contract by tens of thousands of dollars a month.
This comparison pulls current, official pricing from each provider’s own documentation rather than marketing copy, builds out a like-for-like monthly cost model at 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 100 Gbps, and walks through which companies have publicly disclosed using each platform. By the end, the gap between Direct Connect vs ExpressRoute vs Interconnect stops being an abstract debate and becomes a number you can put into a budget spreadsheet.
The stakes are higher than they look on a pricing page. A network architecture team that picks the wrong connection model does not just overpay, it also inherits an SLA structure, a redundancy requirement, and a colocation footprint that are expensive to unwind once applications, BGP routing, and compliance paperwork are built around it. That is why this comparison leans on primary-source pricing, SLA, and location documentation pulled directly from AWS, Microsoft, and Google rather than secondhand summaries, and why every dollar figure below traces back to a specific, dated, official page.
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Why Enterprises Are Rethinking Dedicated Cloud Connectivity in 2026
Dedicated cloud connectivity used to be a checkbox item for large banks and telcos. That changed as AI training pipelines, real-time inventory systems, and multi-region databases pushed more east-west traffic between on-premises data centers and the public cloud than ever before. A single GPU cluster syncing checkpoint data to cloud storage can saturate a 10 Gbps link on its own, and unpredictable internet routing adds latency variance that breaks synchronous replication.
AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnect all solve the same core problem: a private, non-internet-routed path from a customer’s router to the cloud provider’s network, typically established at a shared colocation facility. It sits alongside other pieces of cloud computing infrastructure like transit gateways and VPC peering as the physical foundation hybrid networks are built on. The differences show up in three places that matter for a FinOps team: how bandwidth is priced (per port-hour versus a flat monthly port-pair fee), how many physical meet-me locations each provider supports, and what SLA tier applies once redundancy is factored in.
None of the three services encrypts traffic by default at the physical layer across all configurations, which is a detail that catches teams off guard during compliance audits, much like the confidential-computing tradeoffs we found comparing Intel TDX, AMD SEV-SNP, and AWS Nitro. AWS and Azure both support MACsec encryption on select dedicated ports and ExpressRoute Direct circuits respectively, while Google recommends layering HA VPN or MACsec on top of Interconnect for data that needs encryption in transit beyond the physical security of the cross-connect itself.
AWS Direct Connect Explained: Pricing, Speeds, and Locations
AWS Direct Connect splits into two connection types. Dedicated connections are a physical 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, 100 Gbps, or 400 Gbps cross-connect provisioned directly by AWS at one of its colocation facilities. Hosted connections are sub-allocations of bandwidth resold through an AWS Direct Connect Partner, available in smaller increments from 50 Mbps up to 25 Gbps, which suits companies that do not need a full dedicated port.
According to AWS’s own Direct Connect pricing page, dedicated connection port-hour pricing (excluding Japan, which carries different regional rates) runs $0.30/hour for 1 Gbps, $2.25/hour for 10 Gbps, $22.50/hour for 100 Gbps, and $85.00/hour for 400 Gbps. Hosted connections are billed separately and start at $0.03/hour for 50 Mbps, rising to $0.33/hour at 1 Gbps, $2.48/hour at 10 Gbps, and $6.20/hour at 25 Gbps. Data transfer into AWS over a Direct Connect link is free. Data transfer out is billed per gigabyte and varies by source region and destination Direct Connect location, ranging from roughly $0.02/GB on contiguous US routes up to $0.1923/GB on some Asia-Pacific and Africa paths.
AWS’s own location pages show Direct Connect available at more than 130 colocation facilities worldwide, spanning roughly 35 US sites, 40 across Asia Pacific, 30 across Europe and Africa, plus Canada, Mexico, South America, the Middle East, and dedicated EU Sovereign Cloud and China locations. On the SLA side, AWS publishes three distinct tiers depending on topology: a multi-site redundant deployment gets a 99.99% target before credits kick in, a multi-site non-redundant deployment gets 99.9%, and a single connection with no redundancy is only backed to 95.0% before any service credit applies, per AWS’s Direct Connect SLA documentation.
That tiered SLA structure is the detail most teams miss during procurement: a single Direct Connect port with no backup link is effectively uninsured against anything short of a near-total outage, which is why AWS’s own Direct Connect Resiliency Toolkit pushes customers toward at least two connections across two separate Direct Connect locations for any production workload.
Azure ExpressRoute Explained: Pricing, Speeds, and Locations
Azure ExpressRoute offers two provisioning paths. Standard ExpressRoute circuits are ordered through a connectivity provider at bandwidths from 50 Mbps up to 10 Gbps, billed under either a metered data plan (pay per GB outbound) or an unlimited data plan (flat rate, all transfer included). ExpressRoute Direct is Microsoft’s higher-capacity option: customers get a physical port pair (two ports for built-in redundancy) at 10 Gbps, 100 Gbps, or 400 Gbps, connecting straight into Microsoft’s global backbone.
Microsoft’s own ExpressRoute pricing page, last updated October 2, 2026, lists ExpressRoute Direct port-pair pricing by geographic zone. A 10 Gbps port pair runs $6,000/month in Zone 1, $7,000/month in Zone 2, $8,500/month in Zone 3, and $7,500/month in Zone 4 or US Government regions. A 100 Gbps port pair scales to $50,000/month in Zone 1, $60,000/month in Zone 2, $80,000/month in Zone 3, and $70,000/month in Zone 4, with US Government priced at $62,500/month. Outbound data transfer on the metered plan is zone-based too: $0.025/GB in Zone 1, $0.05/GB in Zone 2, $0.14/GB in Zone 3, and $0.10/GB in Zone 4. Inbound data transfer is free on every plan, and the unlimited data plan waives outbound charges entirely in exchange for a higher flat port fee.
Standard circuit port fees for Local and Standard SKUs were not listed as public dollar figures on Microsoft’s current pricing page at the time of this research; the page defers to the Azure pricing calculator or a direct sales quote for those lower-bandwidth tiers, which is worth flagging for anyone trying to build a self-serve cost estimate.
Microsoft’s ExpressRoute locations and connectivity providers documentation lists more than 100 peering locations spanning North America, South America, Europe, Africa, Asia, Australia, US Government regions, and China, each mapped to specific Azure regions and a roster of connectivity partners such as Equinix, Megaport, and Digital Realty. On uptime, Microsoft’s consolidated online services SLA document guarantees 99.95% availability for an ExpressRoute dedicated circuit, with a 10% service credit below 99.95% and a 25% credit below 99.00%.
Google Cloud Interconnect Explained: Dedicated vs Partner Pricing
Google splits its offering into Dedicated Interconnect, a direct physical connection at one of Google’s colocation facilities, and Partner Interconnect, which routes through a supported service provider for customers who are not physically present at a Google edge location or who need sub-10-Gbps increments.
Per Google’s own Cloud Interconnect pricing documentation, Dedicated Interconnect circuit pricing is $2.328/hour for a 10 Gbps circuit, $23.28/hour for 100 Gbps, and $85/hour for 400 Gbps, with support for linking up to eight 100 Gbps circuits together for a maximum of 800 Gbps on a single connection. On top of the circuit fee, Google charges separately for VLAN attachments: $0.10/hour for any tier from 50 Mbps up to 10 Gbps, scaling to $0.20/hour at 20 Gbps, $0.50/hour at 50 Gbps, $1.00/hour at 100 Gbps, and $4.00/hour at 400 Gbps. Partner Interconnect VLAN attachments are priced in smaller increments, from $0.05417/hour at 50 Mbps up to $9.02/hour at 50 Gbps, with the physical circuit itself billed separately by the partner provider.
Egress pricing over an Interconnect VLAN attachment depends on the geography of both endpoints: Google’s published table shows $0.020/GiB for US/Canada-to-US/Canada or Europe-to-Europe traffic, $0.042/GiB for intra-Asia or Australia routes, and up to $0.11/GiB for cross-region paths like Africa-to-Europe or South America-to-South America. Inbound data transfer is free across the board.
Google’s current documentation lists Dedicated Interconnect as available from 161 colocation facilities globally, the largest published footprint of the three providers, spread across roughly 60 locations in North America, 50 in EMEA, 30 in Asia-Pacific, and the remainder split between South America and the Middle East/Africa. On SLA, Google’s interconnect documentation states that a single connection, or multiple connections confined to one edge availability domain, carries no SLA at all. Customers only qualify for a 99.9% or 99.99% uptime commitment once they provision redundant connections across the correct combination of edge availability domains and regions.
Direct Connect vs ExpressRoute vs Interconnect: Full Specs Comparison
Laid side by side, the structural differences between the three services are easier to see than when reading each provider’s documentation in isolation. The table below pulls every figure from the official pricing, SLA, and location pages cited above.
| Spec | AWS Direct Connect | Azure ExpressRoute | Google Cloud Interconnect |
|---|---|---|---|
| Minimum port/circuit speed | 50 Mbps (hosted) | 50 Mbps (provider circuit) | 50 Mbps (Partner Interconnect) |
| Maximum single connection speed | 400 Gbps (dedicated) | 400 Gbps (ExpressRoute Direct) | 400 Gbps per circuit, up to 800 Gbps combined |
| Billing model | Port-hour, pay as you go | Flat monthly port-pair fee (Direct) or metered/unlimited circuit (Standard) | Circuit-hour plus separate VLAN attachment-hour |
| 10 Gbps base price | $2.25/hour per dedicated port | $6,000-$8,500/month per redundant port pair | $2.328/hour per circuit |
| 100 Gbps base price | $22.50/hour per dedicated port | $50,000-$80,000/month per redundant port pair | $23.28/hour per circuit |
| Inbound data transfer | Free | Free | Free |
| Outbound data transfer range | $0.02-$0.1923/GB | $0.025-$0.14/GB (metered plan) | $0.020-$0.11/GiB |
| Published location/PoP count | 130+ worldwide | 100+ worldwide | 161 worldwide |
| Best-case SLA | 99.99% (multi-site redundant) | 99.95% (dedicated circuit) | 99.99% (redundant, multi-zone) |
| Single-connection SLA | 95.0% | Not separately published | No SLA |
| Native redundancy model | Resiliency Toolkit, manual multi-location setup | Built-in port pair (2 physical ports per order) | Manual multi-zone circuit pairing |
| Encryption option | MACsec on select dedicated ports | MACsec on ExpressRoute Direct | HA VPN or MACsec layered on top |
| Government cloud variant | GovCloud-specific locations | US Government peering locations and pricing | No separately published gov tier in pricing docs |
Pricing Breakdown: Monthly Cost at 1 Gbps, 10 Gbps, and 100 Gbps
Hourly port pricing is hard to compare directly against Azure’s flat port-pair fee, so the table below converts every option into a monthly estimate using a standard 730-hour month, and builds in the redundancy each provider actually recommends for production use: two dedicated ports or circuits for AWS and Google, since Azure’s ExpressRoute Direct price already covers a redundant port pair in a single line item.
| Configuration | AWS Direct Connect | Azure ExpressRoute | Google Cloud Interconnect |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 Gbps, single port (no redundancy) | $219/month | Calculator/quote required | Not offered below Partner Interconnect tier |
| 10 Gbps, single port/circuit | $1,642.50/month | N/A (Direct is sold as a pair) | $1,699.44/month |
| 10 Gbps, redundant (2 ports/circuits) | $3,285/month | $6,000/month (Zone 1 port pair) | $3,398.88/month |
| 100 Gbps, redundant (2 ports/circuits) | $32,850/month | $50,000/month (Zone 1 port pair) | $33,988.80/month |
| Approximate gap vs. cheapest at 10 Gbps | Baseline | +$2,601 to $2,715/month | +$113.88/month |
At redundant 10 Gbps, Azure ExpressRoute Direct costs roughly $2,715 more per month than the equivalent two-port AWS Direct Connect setup, and about $2,601 more than two Google Dedicated Interconnect circuits, a gap of 76-83% depending on which baseline is used. That premium does not disappear at scale: at redundant 100 Gbps, ExpressRoute Direct’s Zone 1 price runs roughly $17,150 above AWS and $16,011 above Google every single month. What that premium buys is a single-SKU redundant port pair with no need to coordinate two separate orders across two locations, plus direct, tight integration with Microsoft’s backbone for customers already standardized on Azure AD, Microsoft 365, and Azure-native services.
Cost and Network Footprint Benchmarks
Independent, apples-to-apples latency benchmarking of private cloud on-ramps is not something third-party testing labs publish regularly, since results depend heavily on which specific colocation facility and cross-connect a customer provisions. What is independently verifiable, directly from each provider’s own published documentation, is cost-per-gigabit, points-of-presence density, and SLA structure, which together function as the real benchmark enterprise network architects use during vendor selection.
On cost-per-Gbps-hour at the 10 Gbps tier, Google Cloud comes in lowest at $0.2328/Gbps/hour, AWS is close behind at $0.225/Gbps/hour, and Azure’s Zone 1 port-pair price works out to roughly $0.822/Gbps/hour once divided across the redundant pair, nearly 3.5 times the per-gigabit cost of the other two. On points of presence, Google’s published count of 161 facilities is the largest footprint, giving customers in more secondary markets a chance to connect without routing traffic through a hub city first. AWS’s 130+ locations and Azure’s 100+ peering locations both skew toward the same major colocation hubs, Equinix and Digital Realty sites in particular, which means in top-tier markets like Ashburn, Frankfurt, London, and Tokyo the physical access options converge even though the headline PoP counts differ.
On SLA structure, the real benchmark is not the best-case number each provider advertises but what happens without redundancy. AWS is the only one of the three to publish a numeric SLA for a non-redundant single connection (95.0%), which is a meaningful disclosure most comparison pages skip. Google explicitly denies any SLA to a single, non-redundant connection, and Microsoft’s public pricing and SLA documentation does not break out a separate single-circuit number at all, pointing customers toward its consolidated Online Services SLA document instead.
SLA, Uptime, and Redundancy Compared
All three providers converge on the same underlying lesson: a single dedicated connection, no matter which cloud it points to, is not production-safe. AWS states this most explicitly by publishing a 95.0% SLA floor for single connections and explicitly building a Direct Connect Resiliency Toolkit around four documented reference architectures that use two or more connections across separate Direct Connect locations. Google goes further and withholds any SLA whatsoever from a single connection or from multiple connections confined to the same edge availability domain, which forces architects to understand Google’s metro-level availability-domain topology before quoting a customer an uptime number.
Azure’s approach folds redundancy into the product itself. Because ExpressRoute Direct is sold as a physical port pair rather than a single port, redundancy is effectively mandatory at the point of purchase, which is part of why its monthly price looks so much higher next to a single AWS or Google port. For Standard ExpressRoute circuits ordered through a connectivity provider rather than ExpressRoute Direct, the same manual redundancy logic from AWS and Google applies, and Microsoft recommends provisioning circuits at two different peering locations for production workloads.
The practical takeaway for budget owners: never price a dedicated connection project off the single-port or single-circuit rate card. The real comparison is always the redundant configuration each provider actually recommends for anything customer-facing, which is exactly the basis used in the pricing table above.
Common Mistakes Enterprises Make When Choosing a Dedicated Connection
Network architects who have run this procurement cycle more than once tend to flag the same handful of mistakes, regardless of which cloud a company ultimately chooses. The first is pricing a single port or circuit and treating that number as the real monthly cost. As the pricing breakdown above shows, the honest comparison is always the redundant configuration, and skipping that step is how a “$2.25/hour” AWS Direct Connect quote quietly turns into a $3,285/month commitment once a second port gets added for the SLA to mean anything.
The second mistake is ignoring data transfer pricing entirely because the port fee is the headline number. On all three platforms, outbound data transfer is billed separately from the port or circuit itself, and the per-gigabyte rate can vary by a factor of five or more depending on the source and destination region. A workload that replicates terabytes of data daily across continents can end up paying more in egress fees over a year than it spends on the port itself, which is exactly the kind of line item a FinOps review catches only if someone is looking for it.
The third mistake is assuming a dedicated connection location maps one-to-one with a cloud region. ExpressRoute peering locations, Direct Connect locations, and Interconnect colocation facilities are physical meet-me points that can sit hundreds of miles from the actual cloud region a workload runs in, and all three providers route traffic over their own backbone between the two. That is normal and by design, but teams sizing a connection for a specific latency target need to account for that backbone hop rather than assuming the colocation facility is the cloud region itself. The fourth and final recurring mistake is treating the SLA percentage as a guarantee of actual uptime rather than a service-credit trigger. A 99.95% or 99.99% SLA describes what credit a customer receives after an outage, not a technical promise that the outage will not happen, and procurement teams that confuse the two tend to under-invest in their own failover testing.
Real-World Examples: Who Actually Uses Each Service
Case studies for dedicated cloud connectivity are less common than for compute or AI services, since most enterprises treat their network architecture as a competitive or security detail. A handful of companies have gone on record, though, and their use cases map closely to the strengths each platform publishes.
- TBC Bank, Georgia’s largest bank, adopted AWS Direct Connect to cut API-call latency between its on-premises core banking systems and AWS, a textbook fit for Direct Connect’s per-port pricing and dense Europe/Asia location coverage, detailed in AWS’s own TBC Bank case study.
- Red Bull Media House runs a hybrid media production pipeline that bridges on-premises storage with AWS compute over Direct Connect, a pattern common among media and broadcast companies moving large video files that would be impractical over the public internet, according to AWS’s published case study.
- BT Group pairs AWS Direct Connect with AWS Transit Gateway to connect its on-premises network to applications running in AWS, an architecture AWS and HashiCorp documented jointly in a partner success story.
- Globo, Brazil’s largest media conglomerate, uses Google Cloud Interconnect to move completed broadcast content between its production facilities and Google Cloud as part of its distribution workflow, per Google’s own customer profile.
- A mid-size healthcare network migrating an electronic health records system typically provisions a redundant pair of 1-10 Gbps connections specifically to keep protected health information off the public internet path while still meeting sub-20-millisecond latency targets for clinical applications, a common architecture pattern across all three providers’ own reference documentation.
- Financial services firms running algorithmic trading or market data platforms are frequent dedicated-connection customers because microsecond-level jitter on the public internet is unacceptable, which is why AWS, Azure, and Google all maintain dense Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, and Interconnect presence in financial hub metros like New York, London, Chicago, and Tokyo.
Best Use Cases for Each Platform
Choosing between Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, and Interconnect usually comes down to which cloud already hosts the majority of a company’s workloads, since none of the three services connects meaningfully to a competitor’s cloud. Within that constraint, the differences above point toward clear recommendations.
- AWS-first companies running cost-sensitive, high-bandwidth workloads benefit most from Direct Connect’s per-port pricing, especially if they can tolerate managing two separate connections for redundancy rather than paying for a bundled pair.
- Enterprises standardized on Microsoft 365, Azure AD/Entra ID, and Windows Server Active Directory get the most value from ExpressRoute, since the premium over AWS and Google buys native integration with the rest of the Microsoft stack and a single-SKU redundant pair that is simpler to provision and audit.
- Media, broadcast, and data-heavy companies operating outside major cloud hub cities should evaluate Google Cloud Interconnect first, since its 161-location footprint reaches more secondary metros than AWS or Azure’s published location lists.
- Multi-cloud organizations running workloads across all three providers often end up provisioning a mix of all three services rather than standardizing on one, using each provider’s dedicated connection only for the portion of traffic that actually terminates in that cloud, a pattern we also cover in our broader AWS vs Azure vs Google Cloud comparison.
- Regulated industries such as banking, healthcare, and insurance should budget for the redundant configuration from day one and treat the single-connection SLA numbers in this comparison as the floor to avoid, not a viable production target. These same industries are often the ones running hybrid deployments on AWS Outposts, Azure Local, or Google Distributed Cloud hardware that depends on one of these dedicated links for its cloud uplink.
- Startups and mid-market companies with sub-1 Gbps requirements are usually better served by a Direct Connect hosted connection or a Google Partner Interconnect VLAN attachment, both of which scale down to far smaller, cheaper increments than a full dedicated port.
How to Migrate Between Direct Connect, ExpressRoute, and Interconnect
Moving a dedicated connection from one cloud provider to another, or adding a second provider’s connection alongside an existing one, follows a similar sequence across all three services. The steps below outline the general migration path a network team should budget time and vendor coordination for.
- Audit current bandwidth utilization and growth trajectory on the existing connection to size the replacement correctly rather than guessing at a port speed.
- Identify which colocation facility the new provider supports that is closest to, or ideally shares a building with, the existing cross-connect to minimize new cabling and provider coordination.
- Order the new dedicated port or circuit (AWS dedicated connection, ExpressRoute Direct port pair, or Google Dedicated Interconnect circuit) well ahead of the cutover date, since physical cross-connect provisioning through a colocation provider can take longer than the cloud-side configuration.
- Configure the virtual interface or VLAN attachment on the new connection and validate BGP session establishment before routing any production traffic across it.
- Run the new connection in parallel with the existing one, mirroring a subset of non-critical traffic to validate latency, packet loss, and throughput against the old path.
- Update routing policies, route tables, or Azure Route Server/AWS Transit Gateway/Google Cloud Router configurations to prefer the new path for the workloads being migrated, following the same routing-precedence logic covered in our AWS Transit Gateway vs VPC Peering vs PrivateLink comparison.
- Cut over production traffic in stages rather than all at once, starting with the least latency-sensitive workloads.
- Decommission the old connection only after a full billing cycle has passed with no incidents on the new path, to avoid losing the ability to fail back quickly.
Teams managing infrastructure as code typically define the new connection alongside the old one in the same Terraform configuration during the parallel-run phase, which keeps both paths auditable until the cutover is complete.
resource "aws_dx_connection" "primary" {
name = "dx-primary-ashburn"
bandwidth = "10Gbps"
location = "EqDC2"
}
resource "aws_dx_gateway" "hybrid_gw" {
name = "hybrid-dx-gateway"
amazon_side_asn = 64512
}
resource "aws_dx_gateway_association" "vpc_assoc" {
dx_gateway_id = aws_dx_gateway.hybrid_gw.id
associated_gateway_id = aws_vpn_gateway.main.id
}The same pattern applies with the azurerm_express_route_circuit and google_compute_interconnect_attachment resources for Azure and Google respectively, which keeps the migration plan version-controlled instead of relying on manual console changes that are easy to lose track of mid-cutover.
Pros and Cons of Each Service
AWS Direct Connect: Pros and Cons
Direct Connect’s per-port, pay-as-you-go pricing and the widest published range of port speeds, from 50 Mbps hosted connections up to 400 Gbps dedicated ports, make it the most flexible of the three for companies that want to size a connection precisely rather than buying a bundled pair. The tradeoff is that redundancy is entirely the customer’s responsibility to architect and pay for separately, and the published 92.5% single-connection SLA is a blunt reminder of that. Its 130+ locations are strong but slightly behind Google’s published footprint in secondary markets.
Azure ExpressRoute: Pros and Cons
ExpressRoute Direct’s bundled port-pair model removes the redundancy-planning burden and ships with a published 99.95% SLA out of the box, plus the deepest native integration with Microsoft 365, Azure AD/Entra ID, and the rest of the Microsoft ecosystem. The cost is real: Zone 1 pricing runs 76-83% higher per month than an equivalent redundant AWS or Google setup at 10 Gbps, and that gap only grows in dollar terms at 100 Gbps. Standard ExpressRoute circuit pricing also is not fully published, forcing a calculator login or sales conversation for smaller bandwidth tiers.
Google Cloud Interconnect: Pros and Cons
Google’s 161 published colocation facilities are the largest footprint of the three, its 10 Gbps and 100 Gbps circuit pricing is the cheapest per-gigabit of the group, and linking up to eight 100 Gbps circuits for 800 Gbps on a single connection gives it the highest published ceiling for a single logical connection. The downside is Google’s hardline stance on SLA: zero uptime commitment on a single connection or on connections confined to one edge availability domain, which makes the redundant, multi-zone topology mandatory reading before any production deployment, not optional best practice.
FinOps Tips for Dedicated Cloud Connectivity Spend
Dedicated connections are one of the few cloud line items that do not autoscale down when traffic drops, which makes them a recurring target for FinOps reviews. A few patterns consistently show up when enterprises audit this spend. First, port speeds get provisioned for projected peak traffic and rarely downsized once a workload matures and its actual bandwidth needs become clear, so an annual right-sizing review against real utilization metrics is worth the hour it takes. Second, teams that provisioned redundant ports years ago at a lower speed tier sometimes discover newer, higher-capacity single ports would cost less combined than their original pair, especially on AWS and Google’s per-port-hour model where pricing per Gbps tends to improve at higher tiers.
Third, outbound data transfer pricing varies meaningfully by route on all three platforms, so workloads that can be re-architected to keep replication traffic within the same geographic zone, rather than crossing from, say, South America to the US, avoid some of the highest per-gigabyte rates in each provider’s published tables. Finally, for companies already deep into one provider’s unlimited data plan or flat port-pair model, comparing the all-in monthly cost against the metered alternative at current actual traffic volumes at least once a year catches cases where traffic patterns shifted enough to flip which pricing model is cheaper.
A fifth pattern worth building into any FinOps calendar, similar to the access-review discipline we outlined in our piece on cloud entitlement risk and unused access: tag dedicated connection spend by business unit or workload the same way compute and storage spend gets tagged. Because a Direct Connect port, ExpressRoute circuit, or Interconnect VLAN attachment is a single shared pipe serving many applications, it is one of the few cloud line items that can hide behind a generic “networking” cost center for years without anyone tracing it back to the specific workloads actually driving its utilization. Allocating that cost by traffic volume per application, even approximately, is usually enough to surface whether the current port speed still matches what the business genuinely needs.
The Verdict: Which Dedicated Connection Wins in 2026
There is no single winner across Direct Connect vs ExpressRoute vs Interconnect because the three services are not really competing for the same budget line; they are each the only on-ramp into their own cloud. The real decision is which cloud a company’s workloads already live in, and then how to architect redundancy within that provider’s model.
On pure cost efficiency, Google Cloud Interconnect edges out AWS Direct Connect by a small margin at redundant 10 Gbps ($3,398.88/month versus $3,285/month) while offering the largest published location footprint at 161 facilities. AWS remains the most flexible on port sizing, with increments running from 50 Mbps all the way to 400 Gbps and the most granular published SLA tiers. Azure ExpressRoute costs significantly more at every bandwidth tier examined here, roughly $2.6K-$17K more per month depending on speed, but that premium buys a bundled redundant pair, a published 99.95% SLA without extra architecture work, and the tightest integration with Microsoft’s enterprise software stack. For a company already standardized on Microsoft 365 and Azure AD, that premium is frequently worth paying. For a cost-conscious AWS or Google shop, it would be difficult to justify.
Frequently Asked Questions
Can I connect AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, and Google Cloud Interconnect to the same on-premises router?
Yes. Many multi-cloud enterprises run all three simultaneously from the same data center or colocation facility, provisioning separate physical cross-connects and BGP sessions for each cloud provider, then using internal routing policy to direct traffic to the correct connection based on destination.
Is AWS Direct Connect, Azure ExpressRoute, or Google Cloud Interconnect cheaper overall?
Based on current official pricing for a redundant 10 Gbps configuration, Google Cloud Interconnect and AWS Direct Connect land within about $114/month of each other, while Azure ExpressRoute Direct costs roughly $2,600-$2,715/month more for the equivalent redundant bandwidth, since its port-pair pricing bundles redundancy into a single flat fee.
Do I need a redundant connection for production workloads?
All three providers effectively say yes. AWS publishes a 92.5% SLA for single connections with no credits above that threshold, Google offers no SLA at all for a single connection, and Azure bundles redundancy into ExpressRoute Direct by default, which is itself an implicit statement about what the companies consider safe for production.
What is the difference between AWS Direct Connect dedicated and hosted connections?
A dedicated connection is a physical port provisioned directly by AWS at 1, 10, 100, or 400 Gbps. A hosted connection is a smaller slice of bandwidth, from 50 Mbps up to 25 Gbps, resold through an AWS Direct Connect Partner, which suits customers who do not need a full dedicated port’s capacity or commitment.
Does Google Cloud Interconnect require a Google-provided encryption layer?
No. Google’s Dedicated and Partner Interconnect provide a private physical path but do not encrypt traffic by default. Customers who need encryption in transit typically layer HA VPN or MACsec on top of the Interconnect connection, the same general pattern AWS and Azure follow with their own MACsec options.
How long does it take to provision a dedicated cloud connection?
None of the three providers publishes a guaranteed provisioning timeline in their official pricing or SLA documentation, since the physical cross-connect step depends on the colocation facility and any third-party connectivity provider involved. Network teams should treat the colocation provider’s cross-connect lead time, not the cloud provider’s side of the configuration, as the long pole in any project schedule.
Can I switch from Azure ExpressRoute to AWS Direct Connect without downtime?
Yes, if the migration is planned as a parallel run rather than a hard cutover. Provisioning the new AWS Direct Connect connection alongside the existing ExpressRoute circuit, validating it with non-critical traffic, and shifting production traffic in stages avoids a hard dependency on a single cutover window.
Which provider has the most dedicated connection locations?
Google Cloud publishes the largest count, with Dedicated Interconnect available from 161 colocation facilities worldwide as of its current documentation, ahead of AWS’s 130+ published Direct Connect locations and Microsoft’s 100+ published ExpressRoute peering locations.
