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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

#41

Post by bifrost »

achille2 wrote: post #36
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

I always thought that Netflix served everything from AWS. How can they they have their own AS number and peering locations?

Yeah, you were wrong :)

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#42

Post by philp »

exelius wrote: post #37
MiguelHudnandez wrote: post #29

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

No; no ISP would ever run externally managed equipment inside their network. They would run it in a separate cage with a direct fiber connection to the gateway routers. Rule #1 of network security is that you never run someone else's equipment inside your network; you ALWAYS make them go through a gateway. Also it's largely semantics where a device like OpenConnect is hosted. Netflix could host it at a datacenter acr…

> No; no ISP would ever run externally managed equipment inside their network.

You haven't been paying attention to that Edward Snowden fella, have you?

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#43

Post by nathancahill »

brown9-2 wrote: post #25
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.

dumb question, but how were you finding their datacenter?

traceroute is a good starting point. Sometimes I have to try a couple different datacenters until I hit <4ms ping time. Sometimes I just ask the datacenter is website x is hosted there.

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#44

Post by bifrost »

jonny_eh wrote: post #39
bifrost wrote: post #30

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

and what's the problem exactly?

Endemic congestion.

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#45

Post by aaronblohowiak »

mkr-hn wrote: post #20
davidrudder wrote: post #13

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Comcast has it's own netflix-like service. They call it something like Xfinity OnDemand. It's actually not terrible.

Except for the STB interface. At least the mobile app is decent.

Are you on X1?

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#46

Post by stonemetal »

achille2 wrote: post #36
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

I always thought that Netflix served everything from AWS. How can they they have their own AS number and peering locations?

Netflix's website is hosted from AWS they don't stream moves from it. All the video data comes from a CDN. In the past they have used pretty much all of the major CDNs before creating their own.

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#47

Post by ef4 »

bifrost wrote: post #31
ef4 wrote: post #26

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Most CDN's pay money for this...

That's pretty hard to generalize. I worked at the biggest CDN for many years. They definitely get free traffic in many places. They had a whole team who's job was talking to network owners and saying "look, you paid for X terrabytes of traffic to us last month. We can cut that cost by 100 if you let us install servers inside your network that will cache the popular content locally."

It all depends on relative size. Bigger networks can demand money from smaller networks and/or CDNs. Networks of comparable size can profitably peer with each other without exchanging cash. Comcast may not do it for free, but the national ISP in a smallish developing country sure might.

It's a big dance, and the relationships are constantly changing. Managing it all in software to actually optimize cost and performance is a big part of the secret sauce for a CDN.

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#48

Post by majormajor »

InclinedPlane wrote: post #16
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.

> as soon as Comcast makes its own netflix-like service, you can forget getting netflix to stream smoothly. Comcast owns NBCUniversal and a 1/3 share of hulu as well as an "ondemand" service through the comcast cablebox and the internet, "soon" happened already. And in many places netflix on comcast already does not stream smoothly (almost unquestionably due to throttling of netflix traffic).

Comcast agreed to not throttle competing video services, at least until 2018, back when it acquired NBC (and so part of Hulu, which it had to step back from management from) a couple of years back.

So if you can make a case that they're "almost unquestionably" throttling Netflix, you could probably find some people very interested in that... but it sounds more like they were just saturated and are now taking steps to alleviate it.

Re: Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency

#50

Post by kelseyfrancis »

davidrudder wrote: post #13
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.

Comcast has it's own netflix-like service. They call it something like Xfinity OnDemand. It's actually not terrible.

Streampix (http://www.comcast.com/streampix)
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