Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam • Hacker News Board

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#251

Post by cheald » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 9:53 PM UTC

JohnTHaller wrote: post #102

Netflix and other streaming services should not engage in these types of contracts. They should instead detect slowdowns and notify customers of the slowdown and to call their provider to fix it, resulting in increased support costs, customer attrition, etc for the provider. Peering should remain a 50/50 split between the major peers. Just because Comcast and Verizon are sitting there refusing to turn the ports on un…

> Just because Comcast and Verizon are sitting there refusing to turn the ports on until you cough up $ (basically a hostage negotiation) doesn't mean you should.

Would you please enlighten me as to why an ISP should be required to provide access to a resource they aren't being compensated for?

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#252

Post by aiphee » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 10:07 PM UTC

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #182

valas wrote: post #132

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think it would drive down Netflix costs? In old world there were a dozen of "tier1" providers who would all peer with each other more or less settlement free. It is conceivable that one of these providers (I think it was Cogent in this case) was offering " low rates " to take Netflix traffic and deliver that traffic to Comcast over their settlement free peering. As traffic flow between Cogent and Comcast w…

Peering agreements existed in the form they did because of the underlying assumption that traffic would be roughly symmetric. Services like Netflix that send massive amounts of traffic in a single direction violate this assumption. This is one of the underreported issues in the whole net neutrality debate. In the late '90s I worked in the WAN engineering group doing capacity planning at a big regional CLEC, which act…

DS3 line? What is this, 1996?

Each individual Comcast customer has in theory paid for a DS3 worth of bandwidth (modulo the "cap"), which should be a reality-check that some of your assumptions from that era need updating.

The defense (and it was always a thin one) of ratio clauses in peering agreements was hot potato routing. The ingress traffic is what you actually have to haul a long distance, so the agreement says "you must meet us everywhere we peer, and you must maintain ratio." Together, those rules mean each individual path will be asymmetric but the overall load on the WAN will be shared between the peers. It was always slightly silly, though.

Hot potato is now over. CDN's are desperate to do all the work and bring traffic as close to eyeballs as the monopolists will allow because the cost of actually building a network is irrelevant compared to the rent the monopolists are extracting. The monopolists are selling so-called "transit" to haul packets 1 mile. They're really charging for access to their captive eyeballs, not for moving bits. If you want to send a few megabits to Asia, fine, whatever. You can do it for the same price. They're not even mad, "glad we could make a deal," etc. The situation is nakedly broken and warped, and everybody actually in the business knows it.

Peering has always been a mix of market power, shaming, and political excuses ("ratio" was one). What we're now seeing is the shaming and excuses fall away thanks to apologist bloggers and weak politicians, and market power emerge as the only thing that matters. Compared to this power, traditional outdated notions of neutrality are irrelevant: there is no need to give traffic less "preferential" treatment when you can simply depeer them and then try to sell them so-called "transit" to go 1 mile. "Paid peering" == "well, how much money you got? Let's make a special deal just for you".

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#253

Post by jauer » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 10:09 PM UTC

AnIrishDuck wrote: post #181

jauer wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The contention was that the change in traffic caused by the Netflix flows put Comcast & Cogent's peering out of balance. Generally speaking settlement free peering requires that the arrangement be mutually beneficial. If the traffic exchange becomes inequitable then the side that disproportionately benefits would need to pay to cover it. In this case Cogent was sending vastly more traffic towards Comcast than they we…

Consumer ISPs always have received more traffic than they send, it's the nature of the service they provide. I'm not sure that the settlement free peering model used by upstream providers makes sense when applied to ISPs. I'll admit my knowledge of peering is minimal, but consumer ISPs have always been something of an anomaly if memory serves. The traffic flow is highly one sided, but peering with consumer ISPs is ob…

Yep, that's loosely accurate for consumer providers but Comcast does more traditional business traffic that one would think.

For example, they are the 30th largest provider globally going by the CADIA rankings (http://as-rank.caida.org/?mode0=as-info&mode1=as-table&as=79...) and have large traffic sources as customers. From the CADIA list this includes Peer1, Dreamhost, SoftLayer, Hivelocity, and Liquid Web.

As a eyeball ISP I occasionally get offered cheap transit from hosters looking to balance their traffic ratios. From the CADIA list it seems like Comcast may be doing the opposite.

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#254

Post by seanp2k2 » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 10:10 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #239

jonknee wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netflix could have held out, and made Comcast out to be the bad guy, or could have leaned on Cogent to get the circuits installed - but, in this case, they folded and just decided to pay Comcast. How would that work? Comcast customers by and large can't switch to another broadband provider and Netflix customers can certainly switch to another video provider (Comcast!). It's not like this is a brand new issue, Netfl…

Almost nowhere does Comcast actually have a monopoly on broadband.

http://nymag.com/daily/intelligencer/2014/02/why-comcasttime...

""" But there's a silver lining for people who hate this deal: By the government's own standards, the Comcast—Time Warner deal should be blocked. To understand why, you have to know that there's a thing in antitrust law called the Herfindahl-Hirschman Index, or HHI. In very basic terms, the HHI is a way to measure the concentration of a given market. And the HHI is the test the government's lawyers apply if they want to see whether a proposed merger would create monopoly-like conditions. """

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#255

Post by cdash » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 10:10 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #227

joenathan wrote: post #186

Earlier quoted context omitted.

So if I need to drive to a customers site I should build my own interstate?

If you drive to your customers house over a private road, you can't complain if they charge toll.

Except your customers paid to have that road built to their house, why is there now a toll being set up (of which the customers get none of the money) to charge use of that road for something they want.

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#256

Post by lawnchair_larry » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 10:13 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #149

erichurkman wrote: post #64

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What competitors? In many areas, they are the only broadband provider. The next-closest providers are typically DSL. Consumers are going to get screwed on the front & back end of this.

Even after TWC and Comcast combine, they will be the only wired TV choice for only 9% of customers.

He said broadband, not TV.

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#257

Post by cwp » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 10:13 PM UTC

mikeash wrote: post #196

chipotle_coyote wrote: post #182

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Peering agreements existed in the form they did because of the underlying assumption that traffic would be roughly symmetric. Services like Netflix that send massive amounts of traffic in a single direction violate this assumption. This is one of the underreported issues in the whole net neutrality debate. In the late '90s I worked in the WAN engineering group doing capacity planning at a big regional CLEC, which act…

Isn't flat rate pricing completely orthogonal to net neutrality? Net neutrality doesn't mean you can't charge me for usage, it just means you can't charge me differently based on the kind of usage, as opposed to the volume. I personally think the resistance to usage-based pricing in the tech community is really weird, although I mostly see it on the consumer end. Hard caps are bad, and caps that only apply to some se…

I think the resistance to usage-based billing is practical rather than economic. With a flat-fee scheme you can look at your bill and say, "yup, $89.95 is what I agreed to pay each month."

With usage-based billing, the amount will float up and down and it's hard to understand how the amount is calculated. Usage-based telephone bills are broken down by calls, which you can probably remember.("What's this 46 minute call to 555-1234? Oh yeah, I called Mom last week.")

With IP traffic, how do you itemize the charges? Temporally? I used to get cell phone bills that included pages and pages of stuff like "Jan 27, 4pm, 239789987345 bytes". It was completely useless.

How about reverse DNS? That has other problems. • You use BitTorrent? Here's 247 hosts with incomprehensible names on your bill. • You use a VPN? A whole bunch of traffic is lumped together. • "Honey, what's all this traffic to nastyporn.com?" • It puts pressure on web sites to optimize their deployment strategy for billing clarity

The "correct" way is probably to log everything, then provide analytics software. But I can't imagine my Mom generating reports just to understand her internet bill.

Economically, sure, usage-based billing is a great idea. Alignment of incentives and all that. But practically, it's a pain for everybody involved.

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#258

Post by cdash » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 10:14 PM UTC

hershel wrote: post #206

Dystopian wrote: post #124

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'd have to string strongly with this. Everything we know about Netflix is that they're a data driven company. Chances are it's far more likely they have seen viewing rates drop for Comcast customers who were affected by the slow-down. If a typical end-user sees their internet working normally, bu see slow-downs selectively to streaming to sites like Netflix, chances are they're going to wrongly attribute the slow-do…

It's very easy for netflix to educate the users about whose responsible for the issue.

Ok so they are educated, now what can they going to do about? Nothing.

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#259

Post by tod222 » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 10:15 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #239

jonknee wrote: post #225

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Netflix could have held out, and made Comcast out to be the bad guy, or could have leaned on Cogent to get the circuits installed - but, in this case, they folded and just decided to pay Comcast. How would that work? Comcast customers by and large can't switch to another broadband provider and Netflix customers can certainly switch to another video provider (Comcast!). It's not like this is a brand new issue, Netfl…

Almost nowhere does Comcast actually have a monopoly on broadband.

A duopoly or oligopoly isn't much better. There's still a marked lack of choice for the customer, which results in lock-in and higher prices.

The Hacker News readership includes many people capable of starting ISPs. Comcast's large profits, which have been used to fund a string of high cost acquisitions, are a juicy target for potential competitors. Yet you never see discussion of ISP startups on Hacker News because the barriers to entry protect the current carriers. This wasn't the case in the 90s, and had Hacker News existed back then ISP startups would have appeared frequently.

The issue of telecoms not having competition has been the case for years. Back in the BBS days Jack Rickard used to harp on this in Boardwatch [1] magazine. I recall him saying something like, "Two guys with a screwdriver should be able to start a phone company."

[1] http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Boardwatch

Re: Netflix Agrees to Pay Comcast to End Web Traffic Jam

#260

Post by nitrogen » Sun, Feb 23, 2014, 10:19 PM UTC

rayiner wrote: post #246

nitrogen wrote: post #232

Earlier quoted context omitted.

9% of 300 million is a freaking huge number.

My guess is that in a true free market, a big chunk of those households would have no cable service at all. That is to say without the franchise agreements that gave them quasi monopolies in those areas, providing service wouldn't have been attractive in the first place.

Remember when there used to be five different cable companies listed in the weekly TV listings? Maybe you never saw that in your area, but when I was growing up in a semi-rural suburb, there were many cable TV competitors. Surely they didn't all require franchise agreements to want to enter the market.

Further, assuming franchise agreements exist and were necessary, consumers and municipalities should expect better from their franchisees than abuse of monopoly.