Amazon does have a quality connection with multiple providers blended together. It's definitely better than the cheap networks with only a 1 or 2 lower end providers.

At most good data centers there are many peerings. We have infrastructure servers that have had near zero down time for years, including as measured by remote pings. Down time will be on the order of a minute or two a month (average) worst case. Sometimes it can be less.

The cost is less than a thousand dollars per month per drop with guaranteed 5gbps sustained bidirectional throughout. We can saturate this 24/7 at no additional cost. For a few thousand a month you can go up as high as 20gbps sustained. How much would that (fully saturated) cost at AWS?

Providers like Vultr and Digital Ocean charge 1/8 to 1/10 what AWS and Google charge per gig and make a profit. They are still much more expensive than raw connectivity.

My point is simply that cloud bandwidth pricing is massively inflated and that anyone who knows a tiny bit about tier-1 bandwidth knows this is almost pure profit for cloud providers. Bandwidth is very very cheap at peering points.

I’d be totally shocked if Amazon didn’t pay far less per unit for bandwidth than a typical colocation tenant due to their scale and negotiating power. The really big clouds even own some of their own tier-1 fiber.

Its clear y'all have no idea how much it costs to connect that amount of bandwidth everywhere around the planet. It's not just the edge costs that are huge, just carrying that bandwidth around internally and between devices is a massive infrastructure.

And the redundancies around it.

A lot of comments compare it to other providers (or themselves) but I do wonder if it's the same i.e. you do really get 0 downtime just because an incident never occurred "yet". The surprise kicks in when you realize there's a single router, switch or dark fiber path.