az8831 While generally true, the Tier 1s, and to a lesser but significant extent, the Tier 2s also have a far more pervasive on-network footprint than these small town and co-op operators.
For local traffic that’s a couple hops away through the I-X, you’ll probably find fewer hops and lower RTT on the hometown ISP. But for cross-region traffic, AT&T should be able to carry that on-network for their own customers much of the time, and theoretically should be no worse than Jimbob’s ISP handing off to somebody like Crown Castle or Level3/Lumen at the local I-X.
It’s those cross-region paths and international handoffs where I’ve seen AT&T really struggle. And that’s largely because that’s where they actually have to pay for ports or work out contracts to decide who’s going to pay for bandwidth based on which entity is responsible for the greater portion of the traffic. So once those existing preferred paths are congested, you start seeing the packet loss and elevated latency. A modern day “all circuits are busy” that frequently occurs during peak hours over various paths around the globe.
