[dsl]

> This is how all the big CDNs do it

You have no idea how big CDNs do it. I've personally installed CDN gear into ISP racks. Sometimes you get an uplink into a router, other times you sit on a switch with other gear.

That "direct fiber interconnect" is called private peering and mostly used to fill cache boxes on the providers network.

[exelius]

Large ISPs sure as hell don't do this (maybe they used to; but not in the last 3 years). They have dedicated cages in their datacenters for external gear that sit at the edge of their network.

Regardless, the word on the Netflix-Comcast situation is that Netflix is indeed hosting the hardware at 3rd party datacenters with a dedicated connection to Comcast. Whether you call it an interconnect or private peering is just semantics; it's a pretty common practice in the industry and technologically, it's no different than having a 10gig fiber link within a datacenter.