In some cases, two networks will judge that their exchange is close enough to equal value that they will have a settlement-free peering in some locations at some speed.
Every few years, an MBA at a telco decides that there is rent to extract, often because they don't understand how the Internet works.
Bell Canada seems to be doing quite well at it. They reabsorbed the Bell Aliant assets in Ontario a few years ago and removed themselves from TorIX (the TORonto Internet eXchange, the largest IX in Ontario of which Bell Aliant was a member). The only place most Canadian ISPs can peer with Bell is in the US (in New York or Chicago, iirc). It's sad that local peering is not a thing in many jurisdictions. Bonus side effect: traffic crossing international borders is free to snoop on for the spooks!
They probably are peering locally, just not publicly.
In Germany the largest ISP Deutsche Telekom is not peering publicly in any meaningful manner. To get access to their customers you need to pay them a lot of money and connect to their network at some remote locations. It's the reason why YouTube was laggy for years for the majority of German customers until Google finally caved.
They do peer locally, but of course they charge for it. It's all PNI, and quite expensive. For the longest time, Cloudflare routes from Toronto went down to Chicago.
Any ISP that wants to peer with Bell either pays them to connect directly, or pays Bell for transport links to IXes in the United States. It's a win-win if you're Bell!
Of course. But it will provide you with free egress for files, a game changer for many projects. I've seen some projects from the community be several orders of magnitude cheaper to run than on competing services.
Definitely worth exploring if you have any kind of large files to distribute, which seems like it might be the goal given the question was about bandwidth specifically.
What are you talking about? Website operators already pay for hosting, which at large scale includes paying for your bandwidth aswell.
Some platforms may use their own scale to provide some form of free hosting, such as Cloudflare pages, but at the end of the day this is just moving costs around between users, and Enterprise customers still pick up their hosting bill.
Content providers have to pay for transit (although they try to peer for as much as possible, which is very much mutually beneficial for all parties who agree to do it). So both sides absolutely do already pay! All these kind of proposals are just attempts at double-dipping by ISPs.
At what rate is overage bandwidth billed?
Overage rates for bandwidth utilization in excess of instance allocation vary due to differences in regional costs. Overage rates are applied based on instance location according to the following list:
$0.01/GB Overage Rate
Amsterdam, NL
Atlanta, Georgia
Chicago, Illinois
Dallas, Texas
Frankfurt, DE
Honolulu, Hawaii
London, UK
Los Angeles, California
Madrid
Miami, Florida
New York (NJ)
Paris, France
Seattle, Washington
Silicon Valley, California
Stockholm, Sweden
Toronto, Canada
Warsaw, Poland
$0.03/GB Overage Rate
Singapore
Tokyo, Japan
$0.05/GB Overage Rate
Bangalore, India
Delhi NCR, India
Melbourne, Australia
Mexico City, Mexico
Mumbai, India
Seoul, South Korea
Sydney, Australia
São Paulo, Brazil
In some cases, two networks will judge that their exchange is close enough to equal value that they will have a settlement-free peering in some locations at some speed.
Every few years, an MBA at a telco decides that there is rent to extract, often because they don't understand how the Internet works.
They are always wrong.