Yep. The author of the article seems to ignore the entire line of (relatively inexpensive) Cisco ASR's designed specifically for this. Juniper I'm sure has a line to do something similar. Residential Comcast in the early 2000's could get me from Boston to the Bay Area in ~35ms (granted, I'm sure they were using millions in 7206VXRs and whatnot). Either way I'm sure that 90/10 split-type methodology has been going on for ages. There are plenty of clever ways the CCIE's work in as much of the routing table as possible within their fixed budget.

I remember the days when ARIN would give out AS's to basically anyone. Before all the cable companies merged, I spent my teenage years developing close relationships to my ISP. One of the high level techs told me to throw up BGP on a FreeBSD box and got on the ARIN mailing list with me to get a /30. That's the type of AS that'd fall into the 90 percent category (along with small businesses that who, for whatever reason, have their own AS). Even on my own AS, I'd rarely see latency above 50 ms domestically via BGP or OSPF.

>Routing tables do not contain individual IP addresses so if you are a "normal" ISP consumer chances are you will be in a block that is in the top 10%.

My home IP falls into a slash /22 block I can see in the global routing table. It's highly unlikely that this particular 1000ish IP addresses are responsible for enough traffic on the internet to make top 10%. Top 10% is going to basically be a bunch of hosting providers and CDN prefixes.