> They buy transit at some higher priced and fixed (10 Gb/s or whatever) and resell it to users at advertised speeds that are a major fraction of whatever the l

> They buy transit at some higher priced and fixed (10 Gb/s or whatever) and resell it to users at advertised speeds that are a major fraction of whatever the local uplink is. Globally, downstream video makes up 57% of bandwidth usage: * https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/new-study-examines-internet-traffic-patterns-and-bandwidth-requirements https://www.ncta.com/whats-new/new-study-examines-internet-t... Given that most high bandwidth usage is for video, the cost of transit/uplink doesn't matter as long as you (a) have a Netflix CDN appliance (or three) on your network, and (b) you peer with Youtube/Google at your local IXP. And most IXPs also have most cloud providers peering as well, so a lot of online stuff will be caught by that. Looking at TorIX, my local IXP in Toronto, Canada, and sorting by bandwidth of the connection, we have (selectively) Akamai, CloudFlare, Facebook, Fastly, Amazon, Blizzard, Google, Limelight, and Microsoft all with 100Gb/s or more (and often redundant): * https://www.torix.ca/peers/ https://www.torix.ca/peers/ Transit is for reaching the wider Internet, which I think is the minority of traffic. So as long as you have a dark fibre connection to your local IXP(s), which is a fixed cost, I don't think peering/transit costs matter that much.