| Arghh. This simply isn't how the internet works. Everyone pays for bandwidth, You all pay an ISP for x amount of bits per second, and y amount of transit. You pay more, for more. Unless you live in the US and you've been fucked by the incumbent monopoly. If you're netflix, you pay a tier 1 carrier for bandwidth. as you get bigger you pay for an CDN. Bigger still, you make your own. (YMMV of course.) to make it super cost effective, you negotiate your own peering agreement directly, as its cheaper than using cogent/level3 + akami and the like. (hence why google has so much dark fiber.) The whole two tier internet business, has always been the case. Thats why there is both UDP and TCP. Thats why there is a priority header. Thats why there is QoS. Yes people say that peering is free. They are simply wrong. To peer you need bandwith, which requires cables in the ground. Places like LONAP and LINX exist for mutual benefit. However at LINX private interchange traffic has been much larger than "public" interchange for years |
Your statement about UDP is wrong though. TCP vs UDP is not a two-tier mechanism for quality. UDP delivers more effective throughput in most cases, as long as the application doesn't need the features that TCP provides. Consider that most TCP connections start with a UDP exchange for the DNS resolution. Even in conditions where you own all the bandwidth you may wish to use UDP.