61–70 of 111 posts
Comcast's stock is up over 250% over the last few years and has made me a lot of money... so whatever they've been doing has been working and IMO they should keep at it. It's a dirty game and no one is completely clean, so we should all come down from our high horse. Fluid and evolving business strategies are not the devil's spawn that people make them out to be.
Here's a suggestion on how to implement a fair interconnect market. The world's regulators designate a few physical locations as public interchange points governed by the following rules: 1) If you are an ISP you need to be present in all the interchange points of the geographical areas where you are licensed to operate in. 2) Any ISP can connect to any other ISP at those points with no charge. 3) Whenever an ISPs li…
I think your rule #3 might be enough on its own. Let Comcast choose whether to peer with Netflix or receive their traffic via transit, as long as there is no congestion. Given that transit costs money, this will bring Comcast to the negotiating table.
Here's a suggestion on how to implement a fair interconnect market. The world's regulators designate a few physical locations as public interchange points governed by the following rules: 1) If you are an ISP you need to be present in all the interchange points of the geographical areas where you are licensed to operate in. 2) Any ISP can connect to any other ISP at those points with no charge. 3) Whenever an ISPs li…
Right now, these exchange points you discuss already exist in the form of IXPs (Internet eXchange Points), which are privately owned and operated. Anyone that wants to peer at an IXP can do so (usually, and assuming you lay your own cable to get there), and whether or not a peering is made is decided by the would be peers. In the world you illustrate, these peering decisions are made by government regulators.
Why is this bad?
If everyone has to peer with each other for free, why would anyone ever lay their own cables to anything but an IXP? More importantly, the profitability of being a transit provider (think AT&T, Level3, etc.) is already dropping off a cliff due to ridiculously low margins. In your world, there is literally zero money to be made as a transit provider. In fact, you strictly lose money providing that service. Short of a government takeover of all Internet infrastructure, there is no feasible way to implement your solution without putting companies out of business in droves.
You effectively make the entire backbone of the Internet a public service. Your solution asks companies, which have expended enormous amounts of capital on infrastructure, to share their capital expenditure with anyone and everyone. That's entirely unfair to those companies, and it renders their investment useless.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
> With this logic, why should anyone have to pay for hosting bandwidth? Because you still have to get the traffic from the datacenter to the peering point. That's what you're buying when you pay for hosting bandwidth -- transit. You're paying somebody to get the traffic to all the networks in the whole world. The last mile provider isn't providing transit. You peer with them at their facility. The connection from the…
You're paying for sending traffic one-way. Peering agreements are free when both sides are sending an equal amount of traffic to the other.
So Netflix is wrong, because? I really didn't see a single counterpoint in that response.
Netflix chose to go down the route of basically becoming the backbone but isn't willing to accept that if they're an infrastructure provider they have to pay for infrastructure costs.
This is what I got from the argument at least.
Here's a suggestion on how to implement a fair interconnect market. The world's regulators designate a few physical locations as public interchange points governed by the following rules: 1) If you are an ISP you need to be present in all the interchange points of the geographical areas where you are licensed to operate in. 2) Any ISP can connect to any other ISP at those points with no charge. 3) Whenever an ISPs li…
Consider a local ISP in Dallas TX. Since all major backbones run through Dallas, the local ISP can now connect to all the backbones for free and essentially pay nothing? I think your rule #3 might be enough on its own. Let Comcast choose whether to peer with Netflix or receive their traffic via transit, as long as there is no congestion. Given that transit costs money, this will bring Comcast to the negotiating table…
The backbones are not included. You're only forced to link at the interchange point if you are providing service to end-users, be they residential or servers.
The point of the interchange points is to enforce net neutrality at the local level and then let the market deal with transit between them. The CDNs and transit providers would sell service to connect ISPs to exchange points they're not directly peered at.
>I think your rule #3 might be enough on its own. Let Comcast choose whether to peer with Netflix or receive their traffic via transit, as long as there is no congestion. Given that transit costs money, this will bring Comcast to the negotiating table.
That wouldn't work if the provider is willing to drop them completely. The rule would have to be "You have to be able to reach 100% of the internet and none of your peering points can be above X% peak utilization".
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what's expected. What's expected is that you get what you pay for, whether you're a customer on the hosting end or the residential end. If you're paying your data center for 1Gbps, then they ought to have at least 1Gbps capacity to the major residential ISPs. If you're paying your residential ISP for 15Mbps, then they ought to have at least 15Mbps capacity to their peers. If there are 100 people trying to…
tldr: peering issue, right? google has similar issues with some EU providers in particular in france, for youtube. traditionally the ISP pays to upgrade the pipes for the content that is provided by a third party (ie ISP pays for youtube, netflix traffic). ie the one whos downloading pays for upgrading pipes. thats where some ISPs (comcast too then i guess?) generally cringe: this way of dividing costs was ok 10 year…
So it's more like saying "downloading is 90% of their traffic and its not sustainable."
Earlier quoted context omitted.
That's not what's expected. What's expected is that you get what you pay for, whether you're a customer on the hosting end or the residential end. If you're paying your data center for 1Gbps, then they ought to have at least 1Gbps capacity to the major residential ISPs. If you're paying your residential ISP for 15Mbps, then they ought to have at least 15Mbps capacity to their peers. If there are 100 people trying to…
tldr: peering issue, right? google has similar issues with some EU providers in particular in france, for youtube. traditionally the ISP pays to upgrade the pipes for the content that is provided by a third party (ie ISP pays for youtube, netflix traffic). ie the one whos downloading pays for upgrading pipes. thats where some ISPs (comcast too then i guess?) generally cringe: this way of dividing costs was ok 10 year…
The problem is, what happens when you connect a new customer. Well, simple :
1) the income of the ISP increases by some fixed amount
2) the cost of providing this connection increases by n+1 (the number of existing customers)
So here's the catch
np needs to pay for n(n-1)c pipes
Where n is the number of customers on the internet. P is the average income per customer and c is the cost of a pipe that will sustain one customer.
Needless to say, this won't work.
Comcast's stock is up over 250% over the last few years and has made me a lot of money... so whatever they've been doing has been working and IMO they should keep at it. It's a dirty game and no one is completely clean, so we should all come down from our high horse. Fluid and evolving business strategies are not the devil's spawn that people make them out to be.