

Comcast, Level3 and You - wavesound
http://www.voxel.net/blog/2010/12/peering-disputes-comcast-level-3-and-you

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rbranson
This guy is spot on. He actually understands the history and architecture of
the Internet, as well as the business and technical reasons for peering.

To summarize his post: Comcast has essential grown to the point where they can
demand payment from content providers to peer with their network, otherwise
their customer's traffic travels over intentionally congested paid links
through their upstream provider, Tata. This sucks because it disrupts the
natural order of the Internet being essentially a "joint venture" between
private companies that operate the component networks that make up the
Internet.

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tptacek
On the other hand, if the crux of the complaint is, "we asked Comcast for 20+
interconnection ports, and they only gave us 6 for free", it's hard to feel
like this is simply Comcast being abusive.

I love this story. It's so complicated! Did you follow the links about how L3
did roughly the same thing to Cogent last year?

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rbranson
It costs them both money though. I doubt L3 gets a significantly better price
on switch gear than Comcast does. Let's be serious though... peering itself is
dirt ass cheap. Comcast's attitude should be to deliver the best experience to
their users whom are the reason they can even turn the lights on. Peering with
L3 ensures Netflix streams are delivered with decent service levels, which
satisfies their customers. If Comcast has to build out extra capacity to
shuttle Netflix streams from the network borders to their customers' homes,
that's Comcast's problem, not L3s. The same rules should apply to L3 though,
if indeed they are screwing Cogent on the other end.

Everyone has cooperated amazingly well thus far, and these few greedy fucks
are starting to turn something that has never been an issue before into a big
deal. Ultimately it will probably culminate in fucking us all with some kind
of draconian FCC regulation and/or ridiculous network issues that will drive
prices up.

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tptacek
Doesn't this ultimately mean that bandwidth for content providers should be
free? After all, the reason Comcast "should" add this capacity is to satisfy
demand for Netflix content. L3 is just acting as their agent. Is it the case
that then that the next Netflix should just be able to demand bandwidth
directly from Comcast?

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rbranson
It's not "free" though. It's just a switch port to Comcast. It costs Comcast
almost nothing. They still have to deliver the content anyway. At the tier 1
level, the Internet has always worked as a "you pay the cost for transferring
packets on your own network" basis. It'd be one thing if Comcast was trying to
charge L3 for carrying traffic to other networks, but Comcast is trying to
extort fees for carrying packets on it's own network to it's own customers.
That's messed up.

Comcast's customers already pay AT LEAST $0.18/GB, but it's more around
_NINETY CENTS_ a gigabyte, considering most of their customers pay around
$45/mo and use less than 50GB of bandwidth per month.

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tptacek
Comcast disagrees on how much that port costs. I haven't done anything close
to backbone-y stuff since 1996, but back then, the equivalent port wasn't
cheap.

But that's besides the point. I keep asking _this_ question:

Stipulate that L3 isn't actually an ISP in this scenario (whether you agree or
not). They're instead an agent for Netflix; they are literally Netflix's
outsourced network infrastructure.

If it is the case that Comcast should reasonably be expected to give
L3/Netflix a free interconnect...

... then for whom _shouldn't_ that be expected? Why are YC companies paying
for bandwidth? Because, as I understand it, they do pay for bandwidth;
significantly.

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rbranson
A gigabit ethernet switch port in even the most expensive scenario I can think
of would be about $1000. In 1996 it was all FDDI and HSSI ports, which were an
order of magnitude more expensive than GigE equipment is these days.

There is very much a precedent for the scenario you describe: Comcast has
direct peering agreements with Google. While I can't presume to know if it's
settlement-free, I'm almost certain it is. Google's business model, especially
YouTube, depends on it.

Your conclusion is a little off kilter. Peering is cheap because they do these
types of interconnects in these carrier hotels, and as we all know, running a
Cat5 cable through a building is cheap. However, space in these carrier hotels
is absurdly expensive because of the demand. This is fine if you just have a
few racks of equipment and ship all the packets out over WAN links to your
datacenters, which is pretty much the status quo. Not just any average joe is
going to be able to setup shop in these places.

YC companies pay for bandwidth because it's cheaper to do that then it is to
build out a network. It's the same reason they don't build datacenters, own
office space, etc. Most don't even own or operate dedicated servers anymore.
Peering works at certain levels of network scale, but below that, somewhat
pointless from a business/financial perspective.

Check out SoftLayer's peering page: <http://www.softlayer.com/network/peering>
If peering was as expensive and as uncommon as Comcast claims, why would
SoftLayer need a special page for it?

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tptacek
This is an awesome post. Here's an accompanying awesome NANOG message:

<http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Nov/1058>

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snsr
Thanks for the link; that's the most succinct breakdown of the neutrality
situation I've read to date. Still working my way through the thread.

