I don't think Apple pays normal bandwidth fees for updates.
A family member was working at a telecom company when the iphone was first announced. One of the big worries from the cell providers was all the bandwidth required to push OS & App updates to all the phones. Apple finally agreed to deploy proxy caching POP servers to various locations, and pay to maintain them. I don't know for sure if these still exist...
However, one of the only ways that I can fully saturate my 1gbps FiOS connection is to download Apple updates.
A family member was working at a telecom company when the iphone was first announced. One of the big worries from the cell providers was all the bandwidth required to push OS & App updates to all the phones. Apple finally agreed to deploy proxy caching POP servers to various locations, and pay to maintain them. I don't know for sure if these still exist...
However, one of the only ways that I can fully saturate my 1gbps FiOS connection is to download Apple updates.