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Level3 is without peer, now what to do?

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

#311

Post by BWStearns »

jsz0 wrote: post #154
thedufer wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

I've been speed testing my shitty (Time Warner, yay) internet lately and am getting fully 50% of my 15m/s that I pay a whopping $80+/mo (hard to disambiguate between the 'packaged' cost with TV). I once got a Comcast rep to admit that they basically were unconcerned with providing anything which is at least %60 of the level that they advertise. Unless the entire company is both mentally and physically challenged I seriously doubt that this represents a "best effort" class of service. This is go-fuck-yourself service that a dive bar would be embarrassed by.

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

#312

Post by thefreeman »

pas wrote: post #309
runeks wrote: post #243

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Interesting suggestion. I've often thought about this. What I hear (I'm not very knowledgeable in this field) is that somewhere up the chain, someone has to pay for bandwidth (per GB) (can anyone confirm this?). But consumers prefer to know how much they will pay each month, and so they get that -- a flat rate service. So now we have a situation where a company's expenses are measured in GB of data transferred, and t…

Virtual Servers come with some TeraBytes per month. AWS and Google Compute Engine counts traffic by the GigaByte. Most upstream providers at colocation facilities use 95th percentile pricing, that is you have a gigabit link, or a 10g link, and every 5 minutes they take a sample of current speed, and then at the end of the month they sort those samples and take the sample at the "95th percentile", which can be underst…

Just a follow up to your 95 percentile rule, there is a famous story of Google exploiting this (in the early days before they were flush with money) in order to transfer their data to a new data center on the opposite coast. http://www.dodgycoder.net/2013/02/googles-fiber-leeching-cap...

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

#313

Post by malandrew »

ChuckMcM wrote: post #188
exelius wrote: post #159

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 alternati…

Good points, allow me to share with you a bit of my strategy. There is a case to be made that much of the tearing up of the streets is a function of people laying down multiple communication infrastructures along side each other. We looked though the permits for the last 12 months and compared that activity to a on-going repaving and road maintenance work. There are several interesting variables at play in that, cost…

Exactly, TBH I don't understand why we don't have the conduit equivalent of the shipping container. i.e. a completely standardized, royalty free design for laying cables in urban environments that are completely interchangeable and manufacturable by any company.

From there, the city can just lease the space on a basis of (meters * diameter * demand coefficient for a particular route)

Does such a standardized conduit design exist?

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

#314

Post by dwd »

elithrar wrote: post #271
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…

> 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 contractor (or two). Creating a new "ISP" would involve installing equipment in the City Exchange(s), providing compatible customer premises equipment to subscri…

"Survived" is not a good description for gutting its potential capacity by 90% by switching from FTTP to FTTN.

Looks like it will also cost more in the end once you factor in the lease costs for Testra's existing network. Guess that doesn't appear in this governments' books and they can kick the can (pun intended) down the road.

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

#315

Post by stephengillie »

rhizome wrote: post #125
klodolph wrote: post #53

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It would also give the CDNs a fair amount in customer support calls, bad publicity, and make their paying customers angry about lost business.

Support calls from whom? CDNs effectively sit behind the Comcast site.

I'd be FURIOUS if my CDN cut off service to part of my customer base, so they could attack one of my customers' mutual other vendors. And you better believe our ticket system would overload with angry tickets about how our web platform is broken again.

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

#316

Post by AnthonyMouse »

lugg wrote: post #276
wtallis wrote: post #269

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The laws of physics prohibit wireless from serving current needs in an urban density. It's not a solution for the future.

Are you able to expand? I tend to agree but dont really know why or what / where the physical limits are. Is it the 4g etc tech that can't perform with real load or WiFi that will fall over? Is a mesh network an answer?

The problem is that wireless is a shared medium. If you have a certain amount of spectrum, you can transfer a finite number of bits per second using it, and that capacity is shared between all devices in range. The bandwidth available in a certain chunk of spectrum is a physical limit. There is no way to expand capacity other than by allocating more spectrum, and radio spectrum is extremely scarce. So the more users you have using cellular for internet, the less bandwidth they each get.

The solution when you want to have "wireless" devices but there isn't enough wireless spectrum is to use wireless for the "last 50 meters" rather than the last mile. In other words, you have fiber to the premises and then WiFi within the building. By keeping the wireless power levels as low as possible you reduce the number of other users you're sharing the spectrum with and allow each user to have a satisfactory amount of bandwidth. Then reserve cellular wireless for users not in a building, e.g. accessing a map from your car, and have all manner of stupid bandwidth caps to discourage usage of cellular wireless whenever it isn't strictly necessary.

> Is a mesh network an answer?

No. Mesh networks would allow you to have more bandwidth per user by reducing wireless power levels and shrinking the geographic size of the collision domain, but that would require peers to act as repeaters between other peers and the tower. That's an epic fail. It adds latency, reduces battery life, impacts reliability if any peer's device is flaky, has security implications, etc. Wireless mesh networks ironically work much better for fixed-position devices than mobile devices, because they can use directional antennas, don't have the extreme power constraints mobile devices do, etc.

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

#317

Post by incongruity »

danielweber wrote: post #155
CocaKoala wrote: post #116

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

There's an old saying in the car world – people buy horsepower and drive torque. Car companies always talk up the HP (even when they're kind of sad for the weight of the car, but I digress)…

ISPs sell peak speeds and customers live the reality of the fine print that talks all about it being a shared line and that real speeds will often be lower than the advertised peak…

Yes, it's their fault, but no, it's not – expecting average consumers to fully investigate every spec and to understand things like SLA guarantees for every product and service they buy in a world that is growing ever more complex has to end somewhere right? At some point, that total burden becomes unreasonable from a user-centered perspective, right?

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

#318

Post by edraferi »

nknighthb wrote: post #310
exelius wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Wired connectivity certainly isn't either. I find myself using my home internet connection almost exclusively for movies and games -- not exactly the great innovative services everyone talks about. I use my phone for almost everything else: online shopping, communication, news consumption, even work since I tether my laptop to it when I'm on the go. It's a lot more convenient; and the only thing I really need high ba…

How do you think your wireless signals get to the rest of the world? Microwave backhaul is almost dead, those cell towers (and there are tons of them in urban environments, partly for want of spectrum) are wired up with fiber.

exactly. Plus even if I'm on my phone I prefer the speed and reliability of my own Wi-Fi.

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

#319

Post by stephengillie »

rhizome wrote: post #166
noselasd wrote: post #162

Earlier quoted context omitted.

From the CDN customers. They'll be annoyed if they find out the service they paid money for isn't doing what it's supposed to do. Since they've paid the CDN, they don't care what Comcast has done or is doing - they paid the CDN, it's the problem of CDN.

Those customers aren't getting depeered, only Comcast.

How do you depeer my customers' provider without depeering my customers? How do you cut off a router's network access without cutting off access to the networks behind it? How do you blacklist a /8 but not one of its /24s without an exemption list? How do I prevent Bob from forking my code, but allow people who fork from Bob to fork the modifications he would do to my code? How do you join tables on 2 databases when you can't authenticate to the first?

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

#320

Post by sirclueless »

ryanhuff wrote: post #234
eldavido wrote: post #200

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This would be an unmitigated disaster. Everyone would call Comcast, Comcast would tell the story their way, and things would be even worse than they are now. They'd probably get on national nightly news talking about how their "partners" "unfairly" "cut them off from the Internet". It would be pretty interesting to watch the spin machine in action, though. 100% pure PR spin.

That's why you throttle Comcast customers. Can't it go both ways?

The point is that if Netflix throttles Comcast customers, the customers stream from Comcast On-Demand instead. They don't switch away from Comcast because they can't, which is what makes this an unbalanced situation.
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