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Double paid traffic

wiki.hetzner.de

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Re: Double paid traffic

#11

Post by kintamanimatt »

"We at Hetzner Online do not support such policies and declare our support for full net neutrality."

Bullshit. In the same breath they offer something that is entirely antithetical to their stated ethos, no matter how they spin it.

This page demonstrates what they say and what they do are two different things. I interpret this as they're making a goldbrick statement of support in favor of net neutrality with the hope that they won't face a backlash.

I will never touch Hetzner so long as they act against net neutrality.

Re: Double paid traffic

#12

Post by codingminds »

viraptor wrote: post #2

I'm not sure how to interpret this post. Is this basically: "we believe in network neutrality, but here's reality for today: your ISP won't expand capacity, so you can pay us to add special uplink"? It looks like testing the ground for idea of "pay per peering" that becomes a separate line on your invoice. (and I mean for any peering, you rent server and connectivity separately)

It's more like "Your customers/users ISP (in practice DTAG, Deutsche Telekom AG) doesn't participate much in cost-neutral Tier-1 peerings and instead offers an expensive DTAG peering for additional bandwidth". DTAG can do this because they are (one of) the biggest ISP in germany.

Re: Double paid traffic

#13

Post by Coding_Cat »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #3

Frequently it seems as though statements by neutrality advocates mention "providers" without naming any. Who are the providers that misbehave, and what are they doing? Can we see a graph of their traffic and a depiction of the misbehavior? (Saturated links, offers to peer and expand the links that are refused, etc.) I'd love it if the evidence were laid out. Unfortunately at the moment, it seems like there's a lot of…

I think you are right about the implication. The providers tend to try and double dip by doing one of three things:

* Not upgrading their network as they should

* Discriminating against certain traffic, see Comcast and Netflix speeds

* or by not allowing content providers to connect their CDNs free of charge, which should be a win-win situation if the providers acted in the customers best interests.

I honestly believe that these bussiness practices are the providers digging their own grave. Best case scenario, they make a few quick bucks before laws get passed against this sort of thing, worst case scenario: the big boys get tired of dealing with them and start competing directly (like Google fiber).

Re: Double paid traffic

#14

Post by omgtehlion »

thomaskcr wrote: post #10

> They now also want to collect revenue by charging large content providers fees for access to their network Isn't what they are advocating for the exact opposite of net neutrality? Everyone's connection is saturated, but they argue that because they are a large content provider they should get special treatment and not need to pay for direct access. Smaller companies are equally affected during peak hours, but they…

> If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction

Ok, data flows (mostly) this way:

Hetzner (or any other DC) --> ISP --> customer

DSL companies want money to flow this way:

Hetzner --> ISP <-- customer

Re: Double paid traffic

#15

Post by CodingGuy »

I'm hosting my server with Hetzner and using Cloudflare in front of my sites. So the connection for my site visitors looks like this: Hetzner => Cloudflare (local pop) => visitor. Works perfectly without paying for an additional uplink as the connection between Cloudflare and Hetzner is quite fast.

Re: Double paid traffic

#16

Post by Pyxl101 »

CodingGuy wrote: post #15

I'm hosting my server with Hetzner and using Cloudflare in front of my sites. So the connection for my site visitors looks like this: Hetzner => Cloudflare (local pop) => visitor. Works perfectly without paying for an additional uplink as the connection between Cloudflare and Hetzner is quite fast.

Cloudflare has written about running into challenges regarding net neutrality too:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/net-neutrality/

Their article about the relative cost of bandwidth around the world made the rounds on Hacker News when it came out:

https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a...

> Australia is the most expensive region in which we operate, but for an interesting reason. We peer with virtually every ISP in the region except one: Telstra. Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world — 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps). Given that we are able to peer approximately half of our traffic, the effective bandwidth benchmark price is $100/Mbps.

Cloudflare supposedly buys transit from transit providers. However, since it's serving cached data locally from each POP, presumably that means that connections from a site visitor to Cloudflare are served locally, for cached assets, rather than being passed on across transit to Hetzner.

Re: Double paid traffic

#17

Post by Pyxl101 »

Could we speed the Internet up with more generic caching?

I'd theorize that a decent percentage of all Internet traffic to residential ISPs is made up of HTTP requests for highly cacheable resources. However, it seems like the mythical idea of an automatic caching HTTP proxy at the ISP level never really materialized. Perhaps that was possible in the HTTP days, but HTTPS makes it a challenge.

How much better would Internet congestion be if there was a way for ISPs to cache commonly-referenced resources? They could even be video resources - if Netflix requests its videos across an HTTP connection by identifying a single common resource (a URL everyone will access who plays the video), then an ISP could simply cache the URL and serve it locally.

It seems like HTTPS is a barrier to schemes like that. Instead of an ISP running a generic cache for commonly-referenced resources, each website provider needs to run a local POP that's trusted and knows just their content. (Though maybe Cloudflare like solutions are possible where the POP is not fully trusted.)

If we set HTTPS aside for a moment, could we speed the Internet up with caching? How much of the traffic to saturated links are requests for the same content over and over again?

Is there a conceptual way to achieve some of the privacy benefits from HTTPS while allowing an ISP to cache content in a generic way? Or could an ISP offer a discount for using HTTP traffic instead of HTTPS, and then cache content in a protocol-compliant way?

Re: Double paid traffic

#18

Post by thomaskcr »

omgtehlion wrote: post #14
thomaskcr wrote: post #10

> They now also want to collect revenue by charging large content providers fees for access to their network Isn't what they are advocating for the exact opposite of net neutrality? Everyone's connection is saturated, but they argue that because they are a large content provider they should get special treatment and not need to pay for direct access. Smaller companies are equally affected during peak hours, but they…

> If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction Ok, data flows (mostly) this way: Hetzner (or any other DC) --> ISP --> customer DSL companies want money to flow this way: Hetzner --> ISP <-- customer

I'm not sure I understand the difference between Hetzner and a customer. They are both utilizing the ISP for the same purpose, transporting data. We still need to pay for an Internet connection for our servers. You're not paying the ISP for access to a specific person's server, you're paying to be part of their network which happens to be connected to other networks. Everyone pays to be part of the network.

The end user is not paying for access to content, so the fact that Hetzner is providing something requested is irrelevant because that's not what the internet ever was. In your diagram, Hetzner is an end user and whether it's up or down data you still need to pay.

The end users are not Hetzner's customers - the people paying them for hosting are. If they want to lease a line and offer access to that leased line at a premium to their customers for better connections during heavy times they are free to do that. It's not the cable companies job to make sure Hetzner's customers are happy though. There is already a framework in place to achieve what they want.

Re: Double paid traffic

#19

Post by 0x006A »

kintamanimatt wrote: post #11

"We at Hetzner Online do not support such policies and declare our support for full net neutrality." Bullshit. In the same breath they offer something that is entirely antithetical to their stated ethos, no matter how they spin it. This page demonstrates what they say and what they do are two different things. I interpret this as they're making a goldbrick statement of support in favor of net neutrality with the hope…

They are transparent about DTAG not participating in Tire 1 peering for free. They offer a way to pay for this on a per server basis if you don't want to participate in this standoff. I much prefer this to Hetzner silently paying DTAG and increasing the hosting costs for everyone.

Re: Double paid traffic

#20

Post by 1gn1t10n »

Pyxl101 wrote: post #3

Frequently it seems as though statements by neutrality advocates mention "providers" without naming any. Who are the providers that misbehave, and what are they doing? Can we see a graph of their traffic and a depiction of the misbehavior? (Saturated links, offers to peer and expand the links that are refused, etc.) I'd love it if the evidence were laid out. Unfortunately at the moment, it seems like there's a lot of…

> Is "operating at their highest capacity" a bad thing?

Yes, it's a bad thing. Internet traffic is bursty so usually you have to overprovision a lot to deal with the spikes. Operating at full capacity means that they get money for a service that they cannot fullfil. This is their intended goal such that later they can ask money from whoever wants to have priority.

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