Bandwidth Alliance: sharing the benefits of interconnected networks

This is an awesome initiative. The fact that AWS isn't on board is disappointing, though not terribly surprising.

I don't even think it makes sense to hold out hope for future inclusion given that AWS has a competing product and makes a ton of markup on their bandwidth charges, but I would love to be wrong about that.

So zero rating but for "the cloud" instead of mobile wireless end users?

Not great. And it's beyond disingenuous to call peering "free". How does DE-CIX make any money? Do your line cards and optics and cross connects get donated?

I don't really see any benefit.

Let's say I am hosting my app with DigitalOcean, instead of paying egress traffic ($10 per TB) I am now using Cloudflare as a CDN and they will wave the traffic pricing?

Seems 1.) not really profitable for Cloudflare and 2.) Cloudflare is not the CDN of my choice because, for example, it isn't reaching DTAG directly, so >50% of Germany has a crippled connection to Cloudflare.

The real problem still exists: reaching providers that charge a shit ton for transit.

As an Azure customer, I am happy about this...as someone that worries about such large players crowding out smaller data centers, this worries me. How easy is it for a smaller provider to join the Alliance? If it's easy, that's great...if it's limited to much larger players, I am a bit concerned about the long term effects.

Yaaay, more power to the behemoths!