Peering has been in place for a long time between cloud providers. However, the cloud providers have charged their customers the same amount regardless of wheth

Peering has been in place for a long time between cloud providers. However, the cloud providers have charged their customers the same amount regardless of whether traffic is sent across transit (which they pay incrementally for) or peering (which they don’t). The Bandwidth Alliance does two things: 1) cloud providers agree to waive or substantially discount the price of bandwidth for their customers when passing over peered connections; and 2) Cloudflare hauls the traffic at no cost to customers to the nearest location where it can be passed over a peered connection. The net effect is customers’ bandwidth bills are substantially decreased and it becomes far more affordable to move data from one cloud to another.