Don't forget about cheap sattelite channels :-)
Lets imagine situation - customer in a country, where all terrastical long- range channels are controlled by one big pro-government PTT. There isn't POPs of any of "Tier-1 bla bla bla" providers. All of them can be reached only by expensive long-rage terrastical or (less expensive) sattelite channel.
Well, this can ofcourse then be taken to the extreme. Let's assume that I am cost concious resdient with a sattelite down-link (yupp, they exist), and a DSL line and a Cable link. Should I not be allowed the same easy choice of up-link as the corporate world? Let's then assume that I have my home on VoIP only so NAT is out. Do I get my own AS-number and PA space then? I think we all agree that the current routing model is broken and no longer does what we would expect it to do. However, I think Randy is right in that this will take at least 5 years to redo though. Just look at addressing / CIDR /IPv6. That has taken what, 8 years? At least, and we are not really near any deployment. A CIDR like solution of this is simple. Filter.
In this situation the most popular solution for local customer, who needs reliable and cheap IP uplink and high speed access to regional Internet resources, is to build two channels to local ISPs (not so reliable, but much more cheaper than even one external uplink) and to local IX.
IXes are a bad example as just beeing present won't do. You need to get peers as well. And if you are a company my guess is that most providers rather sell you bandwidth than peer. - kurtis -