>Many people complain about AWS' networking costs, but I also suspect these are generally at-cost. A typical AWS region has terabits upon terabits of nano-second scale latency fiber ran between its AZs and out to the wider internet.
I'm skeptical about this claim. Most cloud providers try to justify their exorbitant bandwidth costs by saying it's "premium", but can't provide any objective metrics on why it's better than low cost providers such as hetzner/ovh/scaleway. Moreover, even if it were more "premium", I suspect that most users won't notice the difference between aws's "premium" bandwidth and a low cost provider's cheap bandwidth. I think the real goal of aws's high bandwidth cost is to encourage lock-in. After all, even if azure is cheaper than aws by 10%, if it costs many times that for you to migrate all your over to azure, you'll stick with aws. Similarly, it encourages companies to go all-in into aws, because if all of your cloud is in aws, you don't need to pay bandwidth costs for shuffling data between your servers.
Right, but that's not what I'm saying. Whether or not the added network quality offers a tangible benefit to most customers isn't relevant to how it is priced. You, as the customer, need to make that call.
The reality is, their networks are fundamentally and significantly higher quality, which makes them far more expensive. But, maybe most people don't need higher quality networks, and should not be paying the AWS cost.
But the problem is that you can't. You simply can't use aws/azure/gcp with cheap bandwidth. If you want to use them at all, you have to use their "premium" bandwidth service.
I'm skeptical about this claim. Most cloud providers try to justify their exorbitant bandwidth costs by saying it's "premium", but can't provide any objective metrics on why it's better than low cost providers such as hetzner/ovh/scaleway. Moreover, even if it were more "premium", I suspect that most users won't notice the difference between aws's "premium" bandwidth and a low cost provider's cheap bandwidth. I think the real goal of aws's high bandwidth cost is to encourage lock-in. After all, even if azure is cheaper than aws by 10%, if it costs many times that for you to migrate all your over to azure, you'll stick with aws. Similarly, it encourages companies to go all-in into aws, because if all of your cloud is in aws, you don't need to pay bandwidth costs for shuffling data between your servers.