How does GCP handle egress costs and what is Premium vs Standard network tier?

GCP network egress pricing has two tiers with significant performance and cost differences. Premium Tier (default): traffic enters Google's private network at the PoP nearest to the source and travels entirely on Google's global fiber backbone to the destination. Cold-potato routing: traffic gets onto Google's network as early as possible. Lowest latency and highest reliability. Higher cost. Standard Tier: traffic uses the public internet between regions. Hot-potato routing: traffic gets off Google's network as early as possible. Lower cost but higher latency and variable performance. Significant cost differences: egress to the internet from us-central1 is ~$0.085/GB (Premium) vs ~$0.045/GB (Standard). For latency-sensitive global applications, Premium Tier is essential. For batch data transfers and non-latency-sensitive workloads, Standard Tier saves cost. Choose at the load balancer level. Traffic within the same region is free (same VPC).