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Google has a lot of fiber and plenty dark fiber. But peering is not free bandwidth. A lot of people peer and depeer ask Cogent and Sprint :). Fiber is not free, power to routers is not free. But a headline like that will get you more clicks and use more bandwidth.

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You can peer quite heavily without a fibre (or any) backbone. Akamai peers heavily but has no backbone.

Power is a major issue in datacentres here especially ones in large cities. I also wouldn't be surprised if Google use software routers instead of hardware beasts that cost as much as a house.

You're right you don't need to own fiber to do peering. But google has a ton of lit and dark fiber. http://www.voip-news.com/feature/google-dark-fiber-050707/

Forget about routers, Google has designed+built their own 10gb ethernet switches: http://www.nyquistcapital.com/2007/11/16/googles-secret-10gb...

When I traceroute youtube the last host my ISP owns is actually named google-10ge.bredband2.net. My ISP peers with google by AS29518 SKYNET-AS to AS15169 GOOGLE.

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