What, providers not wanting to toast their backbone? When you are connected to every major exchange and have a huge DS3 network, it cost big bucks. We are building a small network and will be spending about $250K a month on telco. Why should someone be able to just pay MFS $5700 a month and make everybody transit bandwidth to him at just MAE-East?
Perhaps the total amount of traffic the small guy exchanges with the rest of the Internet is that many times less than, say, MCI's traffic? No? I do see you point. You forgot to mention the other side. Why should a small ISP who carries, say, less than 5 GB of traffic a day, be forced to spend several million dollars a year to get optimum traffic patterns? I can see him making the choice of $20K/mo in order to be at a nearby exchange instead of $2k/mo for a T1 to a transit provider. Not $200K/mo.
It is asymmetrical, but say you are hosting a lot of www sites and have mostly out-going traffic this solution will work and give you 10, or even 100 meg FDDI out, but only the size of your transit pipe in.
The main problem with is is that A) It is not ethical B) the provider you are doing this to will figure it out someday and see you in court C) it is not nice. :-)
Allow me to ignore A and C, but I can see the small guy making the following argument in court: Why should I pay transit provider X in order to send web contents to big guy Y's customers when Y is directly connected at an exchange? Seriously, if these issues are not resolved within the ISP community it won't be too long before courts force the issues like they did for domain name ownership. Sanjay.