101–110 of 111 posts
You lost me at "No ISP in the country has been a stronger supporter of the Open Internet than Comcast" I'm sorry Comcast but if you can't fullfil our agreement (Internet access) then you aren't an ISP in my mind. I pay you for an Internet connection, not for the ability to send packets at someone else -- they get to respond to me as well, that's part of our deal.
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There's a difference between providing interchange transit, and transit to your end users. ISPs are being paid for transit to their end users _by their end users_.
hmm... so Netflix paid cogent before, and now you think they should not pay Comcast for the same service? Where is your logic?
(The relevant quote is: "(1) [Transit Networks (e.g. Cogent)] carry traffic over long distances and (2) they provide access to every network on the global Internet. When Netflix connects directly to the Comcast network, Comcast is not providing either of the services typically provided by transit networks.")
Netflix is questioning the premise of your question by suggesting that Cogent and Comcast are _not_ providing the same service. I find the argument fairly compelling, though I'd be willing to hear counter-arguments.
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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…
In most cases, streaming is basically no different than downloading, right? The vast majority of people watch a video only once. So it's more like saying "downloading is 90% of their traffic and its not sustainable."
If you're trying to optimize for efficient use of limited bandwidth, unicast transferring of identical content to many many people is pretty wasteful. I think Netflix would argue that network links should be getting bigger and fatter to render the point moot, but given the streams are also getting bigger (we didn't always stream 720p everywhere, did we?) that would certainly take a lot more investment than what's happening now.
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It's worse than that. If you look at how much bandwidth is required for any-to-any connectivity you can approximate how much it costs by modelling the internet as a full graph. Of course the cost of a full graph internet is n(n-1), with n the number of customers. 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 providin…
Approximating the Internet to a complete graph with edges of equal cost is absurd, that's not how it operates at all.
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Why would it be settlement free? Its just like any other peering agreement, If the data was symmetrical it would be free, but its not. Netflix is sending way more than its receiving. If you were an ISP would you provide free transit to everyone? If you did, you would be out of business.
There's a difference between providing interchange transit, and transit to your end users. ISPs are being paid for transit to their end users _by their end users_.
There's no clear answer because there's a lot of competing and overlapping incentives here. But at the end of the day, if comcast has to foot the bill to improve quality for netflix customers, how is that fair to comcast customers that aren't using netflix? It is pretty sensible to think that Netflix users should be paying for Netflix service. If Netflix is selling me streaming video without also having a suitable CDN to get me that video, I suggest to you that they've sold me something they can't deliver on. If nobody can build that CDN because my ISP sucks and makes unreasonable terms, netflix should probably stop selling to users of my ISP.
This really reminds me of everyone who was complaining about UPS around the holidays for not delivering their amazon packages in time, even though UPS wasn't giving any shipping guarantees due to the peak demand. Amazon was still providing estimated arrival dates, however, but it turns out those weren't based on much (or at least, enough).
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Netflix doesn't have a "primary ISP", they are a network. They would like to freely peer to networks and ISPs that they can physically reach (e.g.: US ISPs), and they are happy to pay carriers for transit, that is bringing their traffic elsewhere in the world where they don't have a physical presence. Most large ISPs won't freely peer with Netflix though; that's actually an industry standard, because peering is usual…
If Netflix were to make their users' devices upload as much data as they download (even junk data which would be discarded at by their edge routers), would they solve the problem of the in/out data imbalance, and thereby be able to take advantage of free peering (with no bandwidth cap) with Comcast? I suspect this wouldn't be the case, and the outcome would still be about their bargaining position and the negotiation…
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hmm... so Netflix paid cogent before, and now you think they should not pay Comcast for the same service? Where is your logic?
Netflix's blog post lays out the argument here: http://blog.netflix.com/2014/04/the-case-against-isp-tolls.h... (The relevant quote is: "(1) [Transit Networks (e.g. Cogent)] carry traffic over long distances and (2) they provide access to every network on the global Internet. When Netflix connects directly to the Comcast network, Comcast is not providing either of the services typically provided by transit networks."…
So, if the existing backbone transit providers are not adequate, Netflix should be and needs to be covering the cost of the bandwidth when directly peered with Comcast. Otherwise the cost of this bandwidth is transferred to Comcast customers, all of which do not use the Netflix service.
It really comes down to this... Do all Comcast subscribers deserve to pay for bandwidth that is created by the minority that uses the Netflix service? I do not believe so. The cost should be with the Netflix, they create the overhead, they should pay for it.
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And is Comcast supposed to wire up every server for free? If I stick up a box and slap on a 1Gbps uplink to some hosting company that only bought 100Mbps from Comcast, should Comcast now give my and my hoster free access because you decided to download a video file from my server?
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…
No retail ISP on this planet offers 1:1 ratio like that to its general subscribers.
You can certainly buy uncontended service, but it will start at several hundred dollars per month for about 2 Mbps.
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Netflix doesn't have a "primary ISP", they are a network. They would like to freely peer to networks and ISPs that they can physically reach (e.g.: US ISPs), and they are happy to pay carriers for transit, that is bringing their traffic elsewhere in the world where they don't have a physical presence. Most large ISPs won't freely peer with Netflix though; that's actually an industry standard, because peering is usual…
If Netflix were to make their users' devices upload as much data as they download (even junk data which would be discarded at by their edge routers), would they solve the problem of the in/out data imbalance, and thereby be able to take advantage of free peering (with no bandwidth cap) with Comcast? I suspect this wouldn't be the case, and the outcome would still be about their bargaining position and the negotiation…
For p2pflix, such negotiations would be far easier. The reason is that Comcast would need to somehow send those packets into p2pdflix network (they can't flat out refuse to deliver them in a net neutrality environment, or people would complain that the Internet is broken) so the alternative would be to pay a carrier that then peers with p2pflix. So instead of both paying their carriers, they might come into an agreement to do a free peering.
Peering is exactly that: when network A realizes that it's paying carrier C1 too much for traffic going into network B, they call B on the phone and ask for a free peering; network B checks how much they're paying carrier C2 to bring traffic into network A, and afterwards agrees to peer for a certain amount (e.g.: 4Gbps). They choose a data center where they both have a presence, setup a router with 4Gbps routing power, and reconfigure their BGP routes. Done, and the bills with their respective carriers go down, and everybody is happy.
If there is some disproportion, a paid peering might be negotiated; one of the two network would still be paying, but stil a lot less. Say network A is sending 4Gbps into network B, and network B is sending 6Gbps into network A. They can either free peer for 4Gbps (plus B would balance the extra 2Gbps through a carrier to reach A), or B might agree to pay directly A to have up to 6Gbps of peering, paying only the extra 2Gbps. Even assuming that the price per gig is the same of the carrier (and it's usually lower), it's still a good deal for both parts.
The problems happen with YouTube and Netflix because they don't have this negotiation power with ISPs, because they have a very big monodirectional flow of traffic. Let's also remember that on top of being monodirectional, the absolute amount of traffic is staggering: together, they make something like 45% of the TOTAL US TRAFFIC.
Netflix says that Comcast is letting their peering with Cogent saturate, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't be surprised if Comcast measured that 90% of that peering is being used for Netflix traffic. Otherwise, they wouldn't let it saturate because not only they would disrupt Netflix traffic for their users, but also any other website traffic that happens to be delivered through Cogent. (Well actually I guess Comcast doesn't really care that much about their quality of service to end users, but you get my point).
To me, it's not a clear cut. Obviously Netflix is a good and nice company providing a disrupting service we all love, and Comcast is a big bad ISP with monopolistic control on access in most zones and doing big profits with shitty service. So well, it's kind of easy to side, but I wouldn't say that Comcast's requests of being paid directly by Netflix is totally unreasonable, given the way the Internet has always worked up until now.