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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?

#241

Post by jamescun »

Alphasite_ wrote: post #231
jamescun wrote: post #212

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is similar to what we have in the UK. The organisation responsible for last mile connections is Openreach, and for all its failings, we in the UK are served rather well by the setup. I have the option of six ISPs, 4 national and 2 local. The issue with Openreach is the odd situation it has found itself in after several government reshuffles and countless legislation; leaving it under BT Group's umbrella but acco…

I'd hardly say it's difficult to upgrade, they've been rolling out network upgrades for the last decade, starting with the 21cn network, then fttc and persumably ftth as an eventual goal.

They are rolling out FTTC, however slowly, and there was a lot of fighting, bureaucracy and political bargaining to do so; in addition to ruling out widespread FTTH rollout (only available to new-builds and selected rural areas).

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

#242

Post by yaddayadda »

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…

Utah already has something like this called UTOPIA (http://www.utopianet.org/about-utopia/). The participating cities run fiber optic lines. The city pays for the fiber optic lines (lots and lots and lots of political controversy about this!) then subscribers can pick and choose what services and from which providers they want. I'm in a participating city and love it! Unfortunately politics, both the governmental and the organizational types, are constantly threatening the viability of UTOPIA (http://www.utopianet.org/press/).

>UTOPIA (Utah Telecommunication Open Infrastructure Agency) is not an Internet service provider. UTOPIA operates on an open access model, which means we own and manage the infrastructure, but lease the lines to private Internet Service Providers, who then deliver services to subscribers. This allows you to choose the provider that best meets your needs.

edit: added press link

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

#243

Post by runeks »

cobookman wrote: post #219

I've previously interned at one of the mentioned Cable Companies, and I see both sides. The solution is to make it 'capitalistic'. Change all of our internet contracts from Unlimited (up to 'x' GB/month), to a simple $/gb cost. It would be in the ISPs best interest to provide their customers the fastest internet connection as possible. E.g, if a customer can stream a 4k video vs SD then the ISP would make more money…

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 their customers pay proportional to their maximum transfer rate. This means the incentives of this company and its customers are not aligned.

It's a bit like if you rent a car and the price you pay is proportional to the top speed of the car, but the expenses of the car hire company is proportional to how many miles you drive.

Where I live, we're currently in the process of wiring up the apartment complex to FTTP (fiber to the buildings and copper from the basement up to the apartments). I'm in charge of the process, and I've thought about asking whether I can get an unlimited connection speed, but pay per GB. I haven't asked yet, but I think I might prefer this over a flat rate price per month. When I use the connection I pay, and it's blazingly fast, and when I don't use it it's free. Contrasted with being slow when I use it, and also paying when I don't use it.

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

#244

Post by runeks »

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.

What's the purpose?

We're getting to the root cause of the problem here: lack of competition.

These ISPs already have the lowest customer ratings. If the customers could switch to another ISP they would.

This stunt would amount to kicking a man that's lying down. He's already used to the shitty quality of his Comcast connection, but now he's being punished by CDN providers without being able to do anything about it.

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

#245

Post by ChuckMcM »

exelius wrote: post #227
ChuckMcM wrote: post #188

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

This is all well and good if you're talking about relatively wealthy cities like Sunnyvale with a good tax base, but many cities like Detroit, Pittsburgh and Philadelphia are literally crumbling. They operate much more in a "try to keep the lights on" capacity because they just don't have the money to do anything else. The roads are constantly torn up from traffic and just never get fixed, water and sewer don't alway…

A couple of points, first I talked with a lawyer who works with/for the FCC and established that if the city isn't involved in lighting up the pipes they don't care what they do. The regulations would apply to ISPs using those pipes but it would not apply to the folks maintaining them. He used the example that companies like the old AboveNet which ran dark fiber from place to place and kept it maintained were not liable to FCC regulation.

The second thing that is interesting is that having a city maintained connectivity infrastructure actually has some positive social justice aspects as it starts to chip away at the digital divide. Once existing contracts have expired and the city is in a position to change things (current single provider contracts don't allow for this) a charitable organization could be an "ISP" without the cost of maintaining the physical plant to/from the subscribers. This greatly expands the available market and gives at risk populations more accessibility. Currently kids study at the city library (which has publicly accessible Internet) rather than at home.

Keep them coming folks, these are exactly the sorts of things we're trying to surface and look at.

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

#246

Post by smegel »

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…

Come to Australia and revel in the NBN. Oh wait...

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

#247

Post by keehun »

awor wrote: post #76
keehun wrote: post #42

Maybe I'm naïve beyond any recognition, but shouldn't the ISP's or whoever is peering charge based on the bandwidth amounts? It sounds like they have a flat-rate contract with each other and now they're charging more?

From the article, it seems like the "flat-rate contract" the ISPs have for peering with L3 is $0. The issue that L3 is raising, is that the equipment/appliances that the ISP has installed in these peering arrangements are insufficient to keep up with the amount of traffic which the ISP's customers are requesting, and L3 is attempting to provide. If the ISPs were to upgrade their peering equipment to handle their cust…

So by Netflix making a deal with Comcast, did L3 effectively get cut out of the picture?

Also, isn't increasing equipment/bandwidth part of the business? It seems so ridiculously absurd that Comcast is balking to increasing its bandwidth...

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

#248

Post by runeks »

gph wrote: post #199
timr wrote: post #164

People keep claiming that there should be a "free market" for bandwidth...but then they say that the ISPs should have to absorb the costs of peering (which can be significant -- the hardware isn't free) without passing the costs on to anyone . The backbone providers complain when the cost is passed to them; the consumers scream bloody murder when the costs are passed to them in the form of a bill. Obviously, there's…

>basically expect to pay a low, ever-declining price for bandwidth, while someone else eats the costs of a growing network infrastructure Are we though? Our bills have only been increasing. The amount of money they put into infrastructure has decreased[1]. The Telecoms did have to put a lot of initial investment into infrastructure, but that was largely from laying the wires. Most of them are already starting to see…

> Are we though? Our bills have only been increasing.

I would venture the guess that the price you pay per megabit has decreased. The problem is that the number of megabits you demand has increased faster than the price per megabit has decreased.

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

#249

Post by wmf »

runeks wrote: post #243
cobookman wrote: post #219

I've previously interned at one of the mentioned Cable Companies, and I see both sides. The solution is to make it 'capitalistic'. Change all of our internet contracts from Unlimited (up to 'x' GB/month), to a simple $/gb cost. It would be in the ISPs best interest to provide their customers the fastest internet connection as possible. E.g, if a customer can stream a 4k video vs SD then the ISP would make more money…

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…

somewhere up the chain, someone has to pay for bandwidth (per GB) (can anyone confirm this?)

No, wholesale transit is sold by bandwidth; e.g. a 10 Gbps pipe costs around $5,000/month regardless of usage.

So now we have a situation where a company's expenses are measured in GB of data transferred, and their customers pay proportional to their maximum transfer rate. This means the incentives of this company and its customers are not aligned.

More like the ISP's expenses are proportional to aggregate peak demand, but yeah, it's not aligned.

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

#250

Post by Nimi »

exelius wrote: post #159
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 alternati…

"How do we craft regulation such that those companies are more profitable when they do what we want them to do?"

Sounds like the U.S. already has such regulation - anti-trust regulation. As ChuckMcM noted above, the problem is that Comcast has a monopoly over the last mile. Effective and enforced anti-trust regulations would break up this monopoly into several different competing companies.

BTW, here in Israel, the government apparently has taken the position that services requiring significant infrastructure investment (Internet or cellular networks) are best handled by handing out a limited number of licenses using a bid. We then get an oligopoly where the companies are wildly profitable, until the government has decided we got the infrastructure we wanted, and removes the barrier to entry. Specifically for Internet, we have a duopoly over the last mile "going until the city exchange" to put it in ChuckMcM's terms, then a lot of ISPs taking it from there. IMO, not a bad way to go - we don't pay a lot and get decent Internet everywhere in the country.

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