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Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

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Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#21

Post by sp332 »

MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #19

It's anti-climactic that all it was going to take was a compelling business case. Netflix made it easy with their peering initiative [1]. Now Comcast gets to count these bytes against their customers' quotas, and it costs them nearly nothing to deliver the traffic. This reminds me of NNTP, but Netflix is still running their own hardware. [1] Netflix's "Open Connect" https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines

Most boxes like "Open Connect" pay to be colocated and connected that way. Netflix insists on free installation.

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#22

Post by sscalia »

bifrost wrote: post #14
jonny_eh wrote: post #7

I did notice last night that my stream of House of Cards looked way better than it has in the past month (when it started to go bad). It was HD level the whole hour, while previously it would only go HD for about 10 minutes total randomly through the episode. I'm a Comcast user in San Mateo, CA.

That is probably my doing :) Comcast had some internal congestion issues that we helped illustrate.

Can you tell me why Netflix is so terrible on Uverse 20Meg in San Jose?

Blurry mess.

Speedtest is always 13Meg+

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#23

Post by weaksauce »

nathancahill wrote: post #5
ck2 wrote: post #4

It would be funny if netflix just looked for one of their hubs/datacenters and moved in next door on purpose. ISPs are common carriers and must be regulated as such, because as soon as Comcast makes its own netflix-like service, you can forget getting netflix to stream smoothly.

I've done this before for large scraping projects. I find the datacenter the target website is hosted in, then get a dedicated server right next to it. I've never gotten better performance.

How large of a scraping project are we talking about in terms of throughput?

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#24

Post by ck2 »

nathancahill wrote: post #5
ck2 wrote: post #4

It would be funny if netflix just looked for one of their hubs/datacenters and moved in next door on purpose. ISPs are common carriers and must be regulated as such, because as soon as Comcast makes its own netflix-like service, you can forget getting netflix to stream smoothly.

I've done this before for large scraping projects. I find the datacenter the target website is hosted in, then get a dedicated server right next to it. I've never gotten better performance.

Putting aside legal issues, you don't have any moral problems doing volumes of scraping content that is not yours?

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#25

Post by brown9-2 »

nathancahill wrote: post #5
ck2 wrote: post #4

It would be funny if netflix just looked for one of their hubs/datacenters and moved in next door on purpose. ISPs are common carriers and must be regulated as such, because as soon as Comcast makes its own netflix-like service, you can forget getting netflix to stream smoothly.

I've done this before for large scraping projects. I find the datacenter the target website is hosted in, then get a dedicated server right next to it. I've never gotten better performance.

dumb question, but how were you finding their datacenter?

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#26

Post by ef4 »

sp332 wrote: post #21
MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #19

It's anti-climactic that all it was going to take was a compelling business case. Netflix made it easy with their peering initiative [1]. Now Comcast gets to count these bytes against their customers' quotas, and it costs them nearly nothing to deliver the traffic. This reminds me of NNTP, but Netflix is still running their own hardware. [1] Netflix's "Open Connect" https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines

Most boxes like "Open Connect" pay to be colocated and connected that way. Netflix insists on free installation.

Not true. Big CDNs have been cutting deals like this for a long time. It's often in a network owner's financial interest to host a node for free, because it saves them so much upstream bandwidth which they would otherwise pay for.

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#27

Post by tostitos1979 »

bdb wrote: post #12
freeasinfree wrote: post #10

Using the Equinix IX https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/faq

I don't think so. It's multiple direct 10GE ports. Given the traffic volume the two networks exchange, there's no way it would be economical to move these bits over a public peering exchange (which Comcast doesn't participate in in the first place). Even so, if it were in fact going via the IX, you'd see Netflix's IP from the exchange (206.223.116.133) as hop 8 in the traceroute.

Am I understanding this right? If I am an ISP, I can request a Netflix appliance and serve customer requests for netflix content from this appliance directly?

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#28

Post by diminoten »

ck2 wrote: post #24
nathancahill wrote: post #5

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I've done this before for large scraping projects. I find the datacenter the target website is hosted in, then get a dedicated server right next to it. I've never gotten better performance.

Putting aside legal issues, you don't have any moral problems doing volumes of scraping content that is not yours?

Why should he? It's publicly available information.

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#29

Post by MiguelHudnandez »

sp332 wrote: post #21
MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #19

It's anti-climactic that all it was going to take was a compelling business case. Netflix made it easy with their peering initiative [1]. Now Comcast gets to count these bytes against their customers' quotas, and it costs them nearly nothing to deliver the traffic. This reminds me of NNTP, but Netflix is still running their own hardware. [1] Netflix's "Open Connect" https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines

Most boxes like "Open Connect" pay to be colocated and connected that way. Netflix insists on free installation.

Yeah, it's a value proposition. The argument ISPs keep using is that Netflix traffic is costing them too much.

I don't think Netflix should have to engineer a solution to that problem AND pay the ISP for the privilege of saving them tons of money.

If the costs (4U of rack space, networking equipment, and network engineering around privacy/security) are more than the ISP would save, it's an easy decision.

Note that in this case, it does not appear to be the use of an appliance. If that were the case I think we'd see the Netflix content coming from a Comcast IP.

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#30

Post by bifrost »

sscalia wrote: post #22
bifrost wrote: post #14

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That is probably my doing :) Comcast had some internal congestion issues that we helped illustrate.

Can you tell me why Netflix is so terrible on Uverse 20Meg in San Jose? Blurry mess. Speedtest is always 13Meg+

Its the same reason Comcast was so bad, except you have ATT. Different companies, same problem.

Switch to Sonic or something and that problem will go away.

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