The Cross-Connect You Ordered Removed in 2023 Is Still on This Month's Invoice
By Bill Henrichs
Founder & President, Bearstone LLC | Former Head of Telecommunications, Simon Property Group
Colocation should be the easiest spend in the telecom estate to govern. Nothing about it is abstract. A cabinet is a cabinet. A power circuit is a breaker with a number on the panel. A cross-connect is a literal cable running from your cage to a carrier’s — you could put your hand on it. Next to a consumption tier or a bundled subscription fee, the colo invoice looks like the one bill where nothing can drift, because every charge on it corresponds to an object in a room.
And yet colo estates drift as reliably as any carrier account, and often longer, because the drift is quieter. The reason isn’t complexity. It’s custody.
A colocation bill sits in a gap of ownership. To the facilities team it reads like real estate, so it gets treated like a lease: signed, filed, paid. To the network team it reads like plumbing — infrastructure somebody committed to years ago that simply works. To finance it’s a stable monthly number that moves a few percent a year, which is exactly what a well-behaved contract is supposed to do. Every one of those readings is reasonable, and together they produce the same result: nobody reconciles the invoice against the floor. The bill describes a physical room, and no one who reads the bill ever checks the room.
Three places the variance concentrates.
Cross-connects that outlived what they connected. Cross-connects arrive one at a time — a project, a carrier turn-up, a circuit migration — and each carries its own monthly recurring charge. Small individually, invisible in aggregate. Then the circuit gets groomed, the carrier gets swapped, the site consolidates. The cable comes out of the tray, or just goes dark. The charge does not. A disconnect order acknowledged and billing actually stopped are two separate events, often months apart, and in an ungoverned estate they are never reconciled at all. That is how a cable that connects nothing bills for years.
Committed power and space versus what you occupy and draw. The contract commits you to cabinets and kilowatts sized for the footprint you had at signing. Estates shrink, workloads move to cloud, gear gets denser. The commitment doesn’t follow. Annual escalators compound against the committed number, not the consumed one, and when the renewal date passes unwatched, the whole structure rolls forward with the escalators intact. You end up paying a growing price for a shrinking room.
Remote hands, and the one-time charge that recurs. Remote-hands work bills in minimum increments against loosely described tickets, which makes it one of the hardest charges to trace to what was actually performed. And “one-time” charges — installations, migrations, decommissions — can appear again the following cycle, and keep appearing, because no one is positioned to notice a fee that should have stopped.
When I was Head of Telecommunications at Simon Property Group, the discipline I held the team to was simple: a disconnect was not closed when the order was acknowledged. It was closed when the invoice proved the billing had stopped. Not the confirmation email — the invoice. Colocation is where that discipline pays for itself most visibly, because every charge maps to something physical. Either the cross-connect serves a live service or it doesn’t. Either the cabinet is yours or it isn’t. The bill makes a set of claims about a room, and each claim can be checked.
Exits and consolidations are where the checking matters most. When one enterprise engagement reached the termination stage, the vendor presented a $120,584 early termination fee as settled fact. Held line-by-item against the contracted terms, it wasn’t — and it was waived in full. That is the same validation discipline that, over thirty-one months on that engagement, resulted in $1,852,314 credited back to the client. A termination charge is a contract term, not a fact of life. So is an escalator. So is a cross-connect MRC.
That discipline didn’t stay a personal rule — it’s the work Bearstone now does for enterprises, and it runs in order. Start with the inventory: trace each cross-connect to a live service. Then hold the money to the paper: power and space charges against the committed terms and the escalator schedule actually in the agreement, remote-hands entries against the tickets that authorized them. And before any termination charge is paid, check it against the contract — then dispute what doesn’t hold, inside the dispute window, while the right to challenge it still exists.
If you want to test your own estate, it takes one line item. Pick a cross-connect, name the live service it supports, and pull the invoice that followed your last disconnect order. If nobody in the building can complete that chain, the custody gap isn’t hypothetical. It’s on this month’s bill.
A bill you can walk through is a bill you can hold to its terms. It only takes someone making the walk.
