There are reach products that will help you connect and peer to providers in remote IX's. You can peer with them directly, then have their traffic ride on your network all the way back. MPLS is a wonderful thing.
Yeah, you'll still need a lot of transit to reach people, but you can also peer with who you want.
Most public peering IX's have route servers which have "most" of the routes available on the exchange. Peer with that and you have almost all of the routes available on the exchange. Of course, some entities might not advertise everything to the route server, but most do in my experience.
> Most public peering IX's have route servers which have "most" of the routes available on the exchange.
Doesn't matter when we are talking about DTAG, which is the dominant ISP and will not peer for free. Yeah, you can peer with a lot of smaller networks which is nice, but not enough.
Same applies for the US market where the big players refuse to peer.
You don't even have the choice of direct connections to all of the world with just a single server in Germany.