Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

cringely.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

151–160 of 392 posts

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#151

Post by danielweber »

zanny wrote: post #62
api wrote: post #25

While I agree with the general thrust of the article, there is one fallacious argument here. Cringely argues that cable breaks even and money is made on the net, but that's an artificial distinction. What if cable disappeared? Would they still make money if they had to pay for the upkeep of the network with only Internet fees? The desperation and risk of this game of chicken convinces me that the answer might be "not…

The problem with your later analogy is that there was minimal gating to opening a gas station if the local tack vendor started trying to extort the local populace to maintain a dying business model. That is why, usually, capitalism works in these situations - if the status quo is exploiting its customers, you can create a competitor because there is profit between the extortion and the break even. With ISPs, or any g…

Having multiple water pipes would be silly because of their massive size and the need to tear up the street. But I don't see the same problem with stringing multiple wires to the same house.

Especially if you want to keep on increasing capacity, which we do.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#152

Post by diminoten »

CocaKoala wrote: post #149
diminoten wrote: post #145

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is turning into a flame war. If you can't see how negotiating peering agreements is relevant to a post whose first sentence begins, "There’s a peering crisis apparently happening right now among American Internet Service Providers (ISPs) and backbone providers..." then I don't know how we can continue... The crisis, if you've read the article, is that Level3 is getting shunned by 5 of its client ISPs. The ISPs a…

Why should L3 play ball? Just because everybody else is doing it doesn't make it a good reason.

They spent money on upgrading their network, and now that money is going to waste if the ISPs don't make use of the additional bandwidth (for additional money).

ISP customers are not suffering, because L3 is just one of many providers. What content does L3 provide that no one else can? And if that's the case, how is L3 not a monopoly in that respect? Aren't we all calling for more competition in this space anyway?

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#153

Post by NorthGuy1 »

yk wrote: post #69
brokenparser wrote: post #2

This wouldn't happen if those ISPs didn't have local monopolies. Networks should be opened by selling traffic wholesale to other companies so that they can compete for subscribers on those networks. The network owners would have more than enough money for upgrades and if they don't, downlevel ISPs will sue them.

We have essentially such a system in Germany, does not work well. Thing is, that the owner of the network has then to compete with the resellers, but the resellers need to play nice with the owner. The result is a total mess of regulation to force the network owner ( T-Systems) to play nice.

We have the same system in Canada and the wholesaler ISP (Bell) famously imposed unpopular usage based billing on the re-seller (TekSavvy) to kill the only advantage it had over the ISP.

http://www.cbc.ca/news/technology/crtc-approves-usage-based-...

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#154

Post by jsz0 »

thedufer wrote: post #114
diminoten wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

But isn't that the point? Level3 is capable of handling more traffic but the ISPs are not. So what? It sounds like Level3 wants to enter into bigger-money contracts with the ISPs but the ISPs don't want to, so Level3 is appealing to the masses to help them rake in extra cash (to justify the expenses they've incurred upgrading their equipment). Why does Level3 get the benefit of being David here? IT just seems like th…

> It sounds like Level3 wants to enter into bigger-money contracts with the ISPs As the article points out, peering rarely involves money (and shouldn't ever; as the word peer implies, its a largely symmetric relationship). The ISPs' customers are paying the ISPs for bandwidth and then requesting traffic. Level3 is providing said traffic and then the ISP drops it because they don't have enough bandwidth. How can a re…

> stop promising things they aren't willing to deliver on.

Very few ISPs offer residential Internet access with SLAs that guarantee performance or even availability. They mostly promise only a 'best effort' class of service.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#155

Post by danielweber »

CocaKoala wrote: post #116
diminoten wrote: post #107

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because you actually are receiving the level of service you're paying for, you just didn't know what you were paying for when you signed up.

In what sense? Are you referring to the "well actually the contract just says you pay for UP TO certain speeds" bullshit?

It's a shared network. It's not bullshit that you don't have SLA guarantees. Business customers get those, and they pay a lot more for them.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#156

Post by jbooth »

danielweber wrote: post #132
jbooth wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The article said that their cable business is way less profitable than their internet business. I haven't done any research on the topic, but given that they have to pay content providers for cable, and don't for internet, I'm inclined to believe Cringely -- even though in a normal market it should be a low-margin business, selling undifferentiated bits for $.

If it was "selling bits for $" we would already be done. But today's ISP capacity is unsuitable for tomorrow's ISP demands. One might hand-wave the network as "sunk costs" but the ISP has to keep on sinking those costs. In fact, that's what Crinkley is complaining about: the ISP isn't sinking costs into its peer with L3.

Sure, so you've got depreciating capital costs on a schedule coupled with ongoing operational costs, that gets you to some amount of $/yr to operate the network, and $/year/bit in terms of network capacity.

What should be happening is competition driving down the price per bit to some amount just marginally above their costs. These costs may be high but the margins should be low. That's Econ 101 and it's what everyone who ever advocated for the free market is making a case for.

What appears to be happening is they're collecting a big fat surplus on top of that figure, and that surplus is in addition to all the wasted money in their corporations that's never had to be cut in a down quarter.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#157

Post by CocaKoala »

diminoten wrote: post #152
CocaKoala wrote: post #149

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why should L3 play ball? Just because everybody else is doing it doesn't make it a good reason.

They spent money on upgrading their network, and now that money is going to waste if the ISPs don't make use of the additional bandwidth (for additional money). ISP customers are not suffering, because L3 is just one of many providers. What content does L3 provide that no one else can? And if that's the case, how is L3 not a monopoly in that respect? Aren't we all calling for more competition in this space anyway?

I guess I'm confused; in one post you're pointing out that I'm getting a month of 720p video instead of 1080p, but now you're saying that I'm not suffering. If my quality of service is being degraded, is that not suffering in the context of this issue? I'm paying for service and yet not getting it. So clearly there IS an issue, because connections are suffering. Are you telling me that ports between L3 and various ISPs are totally saturated and dropping packets while there are other nicely upgraded connections with plenty of bandwidth to spare? Because I'd like to see a source for that claim if so.

L3 doesn't provide unique content; they provide content that ISPs don't have. People ask for that content, L3 tries to provide it, and the ISPs can't accept it. Are you telling me that there other providers and L3 is just shouldering them out of the way? Again, I'd like to see a source for that.

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#158

Post by zimbatm »

[deleted] wrote: post #54
mhandley wrote: post #39

Would be very interesting to see what happened if the big CDN providers just depeered Comcast for 24 hours. Would certainly cost Comcast a fair amount in customer support calls, bad publicity, and properly bring the debate to the general public.

[deleted]

The ones who have the eyeballs are the service sites like Netflix, Hulu and Youtube. If they wanted they could influence public opinion quite easily by showing a message educating the user why their service is slow. "Your ISP has decided to keep 60% of the money you gave to them instead of upgrading their infrastructure. Now they want us to pay their infrastructure upgrade. We wish that our service was faster but don't want to get bullied into it. Please help us by contacting your ISP's customer support."

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#159

Post by exelius »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #97

There is an interesting unbalance because Comcast has so much leverage by owning the last mile, they can push around Tier 1 providers. I'd like to fix that, mostly by creating a public policy around municipally owned Layer 1 infrastructure between customers in their cities and a city exchange building. Conceptually it would be no different than the city owning the sewers and outsourcing the water treatment plant to a…

This is how it should probably be done if we were starting from scratch. A system like the one you describe would cost somewhere in the neighborhood of $300-500 billion; which isn't completely insane as far as national infrastructure projects go.

The problem is that we're not starting from scratch. It's a lot harder for the government to justify that expense when there are a number of viable privately-owned alternatives. Or to put it another way: if you had $500 billion to spend and you had to choose between overhauling the nation's education system (which desperately needs it) and providing better Internet access to people, which would you choose?

Furthermore, do you trust your city to properly maintain said infrastructure? Because I sure as hell don't. All I have to do is look at the pothole-strewn roads outside my house to know that. Fiber optics are awesome now; but what happens in 10 years when we need a new type of quantum fiber made from carbon nanotubes to go faster? Will the cities be able to make the investments? I have my doubts given the overall poor state of municipal infrastructure around the country for things like water and sewage.

The system we have now is far from perfect, but we're going to need to figure out how to make something work within the confines of what we have today: a privately owned and operated physical infrastructure controlled by a small number of companies. How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?

Re: Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

#160

Post by jimbokun »

Jtsummers wrote: post #93
jonknee wrote: post #79

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm going to go with customers being mad with who they send a big check to every month (e.g. Comcast). 99% of people only know about their ISP, not their ISP's providers.

Not a big check, but they'd also be frustrated with Netflix/Hulu/Amazon Prime whom they also send money to each month (or year). The average customer wouldn't understand that it's the middleman causing problems, not one of the two endpoints (service provider or content provider).

If ABC has a blank channel, but you can still watch CBS and NBC and ESPN just fine, the average consumer will assume the problem is with ABC.

If all the channels are blank, the average consumer will blame the cable company.

Similarly, if "the Internet is down", from the customer's perspective, they're going to blame the ISP, not Netflix/Hulu/Amazon.

Post reply on HN