And they have high enough volume to average out the outliers.

Did you know that in New Zealand, some business/server telecoms offer different plans based on how much of your traffic goes overseas? It's connected to the rest of the world with, like, five really long and expensive underwater cables, but it's also a not-quite-tiny market itself and if you can serve customers in NZ from a server in NZ, you can avoid expensive routing. (Your customers will also appreciate having a ping time lower than 300ms, even if they don't know what ping time is)

Meanwhile, ISPs in Europe don't charge you extra based on how much traffic you send to New Zealand, because you could max out your 1Gbps flat rate with NZ-bound traffic and it would still be a tiny percentage of all their traffic anyway.

Didn't know about NZ, but it doesn't surprise me. Seems like we mostly agree.

Another fun trap I've seen on the enterprise side is that pinging different towers can have different charges. Highest I've seen was $15 per ping.