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LethalGeek posted:So where does Comcast justify making anyone specific pay for access/better access to "their network" when their one function is to connect home users to whatever system on the Internet that user goes looking for? If their internal network can't keep up with all their customer's requests that is their problem alone. Because it's a standing practice nearly 20 years old? If your transit provider situation isn't working out for you, buying direct access exists, and paying to place your CDN servers in networks exists. Comcast's internal network keeps up just fine, that's the entire reason buying direct access in makes any sense to Netflix! If the internal network couldn't handle it, Netflix would gain no benefit to doing it. Getting direct access to the network is a service almost all ISPs outright advertise, for its obvious benefits versus going through transit networks. The problems were coming from Netflix taking up massive amounts of the bandwidth share of multiple transit providers which caused and is causing congestion between them and multiple ISPs. Netflix could pay the transit companies more to upgrade links, or they could instead just cut the middle man out entirely and directly hook up, like Microsoft, Google, and others already do. revmoo posted:Jesus. loving. Christ. You really take the cake, you know that? The double-dipping isn't Netflix+Netflix, it's Netflix+Comcast Subscribers. By your logic, every single site on the internet is being double dipped, because everyone has to pay for internet access at home, and websites also need to pay for internet access. I mean seriously, think your definition of "omg double charged" through here, and show how it wouldn't apply to some random guy's Dreamhost account, or to some small town blog with a paywall.
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May 16, 2014 21:02
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LethalGeek posted:So where does Comcast justify making anyone specific pay for access/better access to "their network" when their one function is to connect home users to whatever system on the Internet that user goes looking for? If their internal network can't keep up with all their customer's requests that is their problem alone. The problem is not Comcast's internal network, it's the points that connect outside of its network. If you're in Comcast's network, you're fine. But why should Comcast give that space on their network for free? It's obviously tied to some sort of cost (however small). Either the company putting material on Comcast's network pays or the customer pays. But why should the customer pay, if they're already paying for access for the entire internet? Is it fair for you to pay for (e.g.) Tumblr to put their content on Comcast's site if you don't use Tumblr? Why shouldn't the company pay? At the end of the day, the people defending Netflix are basically saying "customers should subsidize for profit companies so these companies can make more money".
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May 16, 2014 21:14
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computer parts posted:The problem is not Comcast's internal network, it's the points that connect outside of its network. If you're in Comcast's network, you're fine. But why should Comcast give that space on their network for free? It's obviously tied to some sort of cost (however small). Either the company putting material on Comcast's network pays or the customer pays. This still sounds like it's everyone's fault except an ISP when the ISP's customers actually request data from whatever entity on the Internet. Then suddenly US ISPs start screaming foul when their users actually start using the bandwidth they're paying for.
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May 16, 2014 21:40
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LethalGeek posted:This still sounds like it's everyone's fault except an ISP when the ISP's customers actually request data from whatever entity on the Internet. Then suddenly US ISPs start screaming foul when their users actually start using the bandwidth they're paying for. It's an issue with how the internet is set up. To solve the problem the way you want it you'd essentially have to get Comcast to mirror the entire internet, which isn't really feasible.
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May 16, 2014 21:43
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LethalGeek posted:This still sounds like it's everyone's fault except an ISP when the ISP's customers actually request data from whatever entity on the Internet. Then suddenly US ISPs start screaming foul when their users actually start using the bandwidth they're paying for. When you use 35% of the nation's bandwidth, it is in fact on you to take responsibility for your massive usage and how it can result in poor service. Almost every other major internet company already pays for direct access or in-network CDNs which mean they have minimalized impacts on standard transit providers and as a result don't have the issues Netflix had by being stubborn about sticking to an access model that fits a company much smaller than they've become. It's the way things are supposed to work! Once you start producing certain sizes and types of traffic loads you're expected to stop using the general purpose transit networks for some or all of your traffic, in order that both the transit network and ISPs can minimize their own costs for the links between each other. computer parts posted:It's an issue with how the internet is set up. To solve the problem the way you want it you'd essentially have to get Comcast to mirror the entire internet, which isn't really feasible. Yes, this. If you want to have really near-to-no chance of congestion, you're pretty much down to paying to run a connection directly to internet backbone lines out to your home, and that's going to cost way more than $80 a month or something.
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May 16, 2014 21:51
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This blog post from Level 3 does a pretty decent job of summarizing "last-mile" provider attitudes. In a nutshell, they claim that large providers in the US, where there is very little real competition among providers, refuse to upgrade equipment. They then use the resulting degradation of service as a bargaining chip.
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May 17, 2014 04:25
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It's interesting to see how much the price has gone up overtime while how the bandwidth increase has slowed, stopped with the addon of caps now in the USA. To provide another perspective, this is an interesting example on what the government can do. Step in and split the ISP into one hardware/backhaul providers and another one for retail, which happened in NZ only a few years ago. quote:On 27 June 2006, the company announced that it would voluntarily separate its business into two separate operating business units — Wholesale and Retail.[39] The Government introduced the Telecommunications Amendment Bill in November 2006 to force Telecom to open its network to competitors. The bill officially split Telecom into three business units from 31 March 2008, with network access separated from the wholesale and retail units.[40] It's because of the above, Chorus Limited, the wholesale/infrastructure side of the old Telecom, built out their fiber network to cover pretty much most of NZ and now you can get fiber from a bunch of different ISPs all through the same fiber that was laid by Chorus. So you can have competition with a bunch of different ISPs while having the lowest infrastructure cost without building multiple identical network. If one ISP is lovely at streaming with a cheap upstream provider, you can easily switch to another one, out of around 10+ different ISPs that's offering you service on the same physical line. 5~10 years ago you were basically only able to get lovely adsl/adsl2 from one company in one area, or if you were lucky, you could also get cable internet service within the same area from another company, that's it. Just few weeks ago, they finally have something like this available Unlimited 100/50Mbps fiber + phone for around 120USD per month, it's amazing to see how big of a difference it made. Imaging buying ATT's internet service through verizon's line. Or have comcast internet through ATT's backhaul. Similar things have both happened in the NZ model where competing mobile/cable carrier are providing adsl/vdsl/fiber internet. US used to have something similar with local loop unbundling and it boosted DSL speed to like 6~8Mbps more than 10 years ago. But ever since then all the new stuff ATT/Verizon/Comcast built out are closed and inaccessible to other carriers, and now we are basically stuck forever.
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May 17, 2014 21:46
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n0n0 posted:This blog post from Level 3 does a pretty decent job of summarizing "last-mile" provider attitudes. In a nutshell, they claim that large providers in the US, where there is very little real competition among providers, refuse to upgrade equipment. They then use the resulting degradation of service as a bargaining chip. quote:Five of those congested peers are in the United States and one is in Europe. There are none in any other part of the world. All six are large Broadband consumer networks with a dominant or exclusive market share in their local market. In countries or markets where consumers have multiple Broadband choices (like the UK) there are no congested peers. Well I think that nicely makes my point, US ISPs are full of poo poo.
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May 17, 2014 22:46
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LethalGeek posted:Well I think that nicely makes my point, US ISPs are full of poo poo. It's funny how Comcast rakes in billions while level 3 barely turns a profit
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May 17, 2014 23:49
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Ocrassus posted:Idk about you but for me the post office runs just dandy. What is boils down to is that there's some things governments are good at and some things the private sector is good at. But there are no things that that turn out well when government power and private incentive structure are welded together. The post office does a good job because it's a typical boring government institution whose mission is to perform a boring utility service under a budget set by congress and accountable to the taxpayers. FedEx does a good job because it's a private business that has to be good enough to attract customers who're more than happy to go elsewhere if FedEx does a bad job. Government and the private sector have different strong points, but they work pretty well in their respective spheres. (Mail delivery is a little odd in that both sectors do a decent job, but you get the idea.) But what would happen if congress passed a law that said "It is illegal to deliver packages if you're not FedEx, but otherwise we don't care how FedEx operates". You'd get all of the bad points of government and the private sector, and none of the good points of either. And that's basically what we have in terms of ISPs. It works about as well as you'd expect. You either need them to be public utilities or private legitimate competitors (possibly via competition over publicly owned fiber, or among different chunks of the wireless spectrum, or whatever).
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May 18, 2014 03:26
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There was a related segment on Last Week Tonight: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=fpbOEoRrHyU
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Jun 2, 2014 18:03
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Maybe I should have just let this thread die, but here's another thing from Level 3 if anyone's interested: http://blog.level3.com/global-connectivity/verizons-accidental-mea-culpa/
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Jul 17, 2014 21:24
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I'll summarize it for you. "Our CDN deal with Netflix is only profitable if we abuse our existing peering relationships and we're too proud to buy transit." -Level3
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Jul 19, 2014 06:50
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I too think that Level 3 should willingly choose to operate unprofitably, and that arrangements that don't cause this are abusive.
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Jul 20, 2014 04:35
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I'd like to add my take. First off, it's important to understand just what peering is for, and why it exists. Backbones peer with each other because they have a fundamental need to route traffic between every major ASN that they can so the service they provide to their customers (Internet Access) can reach, well, the internet. Every backbone is interconnected many places and that forms the back skeleton of the internet. It's hard to really assign a price for this kind of connectivity between them since they both want and need it, so it's more-or-less a gentleman's agreement. "We'll share these 4 10-gig links here, here and here, and we'll just call it even." This is because they both have customers who are on the business/server end and the consumer/client end, and generally it works out fairly evenly. (Save for some special exceptions, i'm looking at you cogent.) There's a different peering use case though too, where it's not an equal share back and forth of traffic. An ISP only that does not own any network needs to get internet access to provide the service its customers pay for. Now imagine you are a small ISP starting up in a rural area, a WISP or the like. You need internet, but who's going to peer with you? You're a small fry, not worth the investment. In this case you purchase internet access just like your customers do of you, from multiple providers, and build your own redundant network off multiple ASNs. Okay, so now you are a bigger ISP - a Comcast. It's worth peering with you because at this stage, the clients of the backbone that they have on-net and through other peers relying on them, needs to get to your users. All the backbones peer with them on the same gentleman's handshake because they are BOTH getting a need filled equally, just in a different way. Instead of a fairly even up/down traffic split, it's suiting their respective business models. Backbone gets to deliver the traffic that is requested of services on its network or through its network, and Big ISP gets to serve the clients that pay them for access WITHOUT having to pay for the internet access on top of it - a cost savings. The Backbone's business model: Deliver all traffic from source to destination, either direction The ISP's business model: Deliver all traffic that originate from our client's requests to them. Even-Steven still, ethically. Now you throw in a monopoly and competing services that the ISP has (streampix vs netflix, for example..) and you start looking at your options to double-dip. This is hard or easy depending on the type of source network involved generating the traffic. Akamai and Level 3 are the two largest CDNs, relevant to this discussion. There is a difference however in that Level 3 owns its own network, entirely, and serves all traffic from it's network that comes from within it or outside of it. So it's going to be on its own peering links directly, from AS3356, and easily controlled. This empowers the Comcast's to play these sort of games. Akamai on the other hand doesn't own its network, and throws racks *Everywhere* in many, many different ASNs. This makes it critically hard to isolate / netflow out to akamai and isolate a way to shut it down or bill for it. So that's a brief overview from my perspective on the situation, and why you keep seeing Level 3's name thrown around in this but never Akamai, despite both of their CDNs having the same goals and service practices.
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Jul 24, 2014 03:10
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