Comment by bauruine
3 days ago
If you send 10Gbit/s to an ISP you have to pay for transit to reach it. But if you send 100Gbit/s+ the ISP suddenly is willing to not only peer for free with you but may even host the servers for you in their data center for free. [0][1][2] So yes being bigger can absolutely save you costs.
[0]: https://www.cloudflare.com/partners/peering-portal/
[1]: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/
[2]: https://support.google.com/interconnect/answer/9058809?hl=en
Don't forget about the Bandwidth Alliance, which is agreements for free or cheap egress between peers.
https://www.cloudflare.com/bandwidth-alliance/
Can't you just send random generated packets. Or by requesting content from other hosting provider with free or cheap egress. Or sending to another hosting provider.
Sending random packets at another AS just results in your traffic being blocked. The network engineers running these systems are smart, and the community is surprisingly small.