Originally Posted by SMachiz

No - the first isn't true, I don't know about the second. The European and US bandwidth markets are completely different animals.

US providers generally have quite restrictive peering policies because the eyeball networks (cable/dsl/etc) are often owned/in bed with the backbone providers. The eyeball networks don't like to peer as their parent/subsidiary/network provider want you to pay for the right to access those eyeballs by buying IP service from them.

Europe, in general, is much more open about their peering, who can peer with who, and overall, the cost to peer at public exchanges is cheaper.

I would bet that his host is banking on two things: 1) over subscription and 2) most of the traffic will be destined to Europe and can be peered off rather than paying a backbone provider.

While the quality inside Europe may be pretty good, it certainly may not be so good to the USA. If it is actually good now, it may not be good in several months if other people start buying 800Mbps+ of traffic with the majority destined for the US at $6/Mbps (as the host most likely have to pay Cogent/Telia/Level(3)/ProviderX to get it here).

Best,
Sam