You lost me at "No ISP in the country has been a stronger supporter of the Open Internet than Comcast"
I'm sorry Comcast but if you can't fullfil our agreement (Internet access) then you aren't an ISP in my mind. I pay you for an Internet connection, not for the ability to send packets at someone else -- they get to respond to me as well, that's part of our deal.
And is Comcast supposed to wire up every server for free? If I stick up a box and slap on a 1Gbps uplink to some hosting company that only bought 100Mbps from Comcast, should Comcast now give my and my hoster free access because you decided to download a video file from my server?
That's not what's expected. What's expected is that you get what you pay for, whether you're a customer on the hosting end or the residential end. If you're paying your data center for 1Gbps, then they ought to have at least 1Gbps capacity to the major residential ISPs. If you're paying your residential ISP for 15Mbps, then they ought to have at least 15Mbps capacity to their peers. If there are 100 people trying to use 15Mbps at once at peak hours, they need at least 1500Mbps of capacity to provide the level of service they sold.
What Comcast is being chastised for, the thing that forced Netflix to transit with them directly, is being paid by its customers to connect to the internet, then refusing to use that money to buy a pipe large enough to deliver that. It wasn't Netflix that wasn't buying a large enough pipe to send its own bits. If Comcast had resolved its disputes with Cogent and widened the pipe to meet the customer demand it's being paid by those customers to meet, I'm sure Netflix would've been happy to stick with its ISP.
Unfortunately you don't buy an always open 15 Mbps pipe, you buy "15 Mbps peak speeds", or at least that's how it is worded for me. Which means at peak usage times you expect to get lower than 15 Mbps.
It's hard for customers to buy that when the YouTube and Netflix videos they're watching only need a few hundred Kbps, but they can't get one good stream going on an otherwise unutilized connection. It's not a capacity crunch near the edges of Comcast's network, where lines are still shared in neighborhoods and upgrades cost the most; it's just greed, fattening already healthy profit margins by refusing to increase peering capacity and demanding peers pay more for bits customers are already paying for.
Which means deciding what an acceptable QoS is for those peak times - many of us think they decided too low - I personally think you should be able to get between 1/3 and 2/3rds (ideally around half) of 'peak' speeds on a sustained level at any time for any amount of time.
It's just like the telephone network of yore, no single trunk was ever capacitied to mothers day call traffic - there were reroutes, and more than one path to any large point, so you'd get a lower quality of service, but the traffic would still get thru.
It is worse than that. "15 Mbps peak speeds" is actually "15 Mbps bursts."
I am fine with getting less than my maximum speed; I understand that the connection is shared and that my neighbors' service can interfere with mine. TCP can deal with congestion. What grinds my gears is that ISPs are not content to sell me a maximum speed; they want to oversubscribe, then claim that they are selling burst service, then call it "unlimited super-awesome Internet!! 15Mbps!!" then penalize customers who fail to limit their use of the supposedly unlimited service.
google has similar issues with some EU providers in particular in france, for youtube.
traditionally the ISP pays to upgrade the pipes for the content that is provided by a third party (ie ISP pays for youtube, netflix traffic). ie the one whos downloading pays for upgrading pipes.
thats where some ISPs (comcast too then i guess?) generally cringe: this way of dividing costs was ok 10 years ago, but not anymore: streaming is 90% of their traffic and its not sustainable.
Sure, but it doesn't have to be that way. Something built around multicast groups could be used to stream multiple people the same content in a drastically more efficient manner, and then it could be stored locally on clients for time-shifting purposes.
If you're trying to optimize for efficient use of limited bandwidth, unicast transferring of identical content to many many people is pretty wasteful. I think Netflix would argue that network links should be getting bigger and fatter to render the point moot, but given the streams are also getting bigger (we didn't always stream 720p everywhere, did we?) that would certainly take a lot more investment than what's happening now.
It's worse than that. If you look at how much bandwidth is required for any-to-any connectivity you can approximate how much it costs by modelling the internet as a full graph. Of course the cost of a full graph internet is n(n-1), with n the number of customers.
The problem is, what happens when you connect a new customer. Well, simple :
1) the income of the ISP increases by some fixed amount
2) the cost of providing this connection increases by n+1 (the number of existing customers)
So here's the catch
np needs to pay for n(n-1)c pipes
Where n is the number of customers on the internet. P is the average income per customer and c is the cost of a pipe that will sustain one customer.
True, but people claiming: "I pay for XXX Mbit/s, I want my XXX Mbit/s 100% of time to 100% of the Internet" think/want the Internet to operate like that.
I think Comcast, owner of NBC Universal, has little ground to stand on here. Streaming is an inefficient use of the Internet that is popular only because people are too terrified of lawsuits to use better technologies like BitTorrent. Comcast has worked hard to set up the legal environment that created this situation; they will see no sympathy from me.
That's not true. Backbone pays for long haul to meet me room. ISP pays for last mile from meet me to consumer.
Comcast decided to not only not pay for interchange equipment, but also to charge twice for traffic. Classic monopolist move.
> If there are 100 people trying to use 15Mbps at once at peak hours, they need at least 1500Mbps of capacity to provide the level of service they sold.
No retail ISP on this planet offers 1:1 ratio like that to its general subscribers.
You can certainly buy uncontended service, but it will start at several hundred dollars per month for about 2 Mbps.
In your example the hosting company is also a Comcast customer, so that hosting company needs to upgrade its link. That isn't the case here. Netflix pays for its own network infrastructure to get the content to a neutral exchange point and is willing to upgrade that infrastructure as needed. Comcast should be willing to upgrade the infrastructure from that point to its customers houses as that's what their customers pay them to do.
> should Comcast now give my and my hoster free access
If your hosting company has paid Comcast for 100Mbps transit, then Comcast should honor that agreement with your hosting company. Your uplink to your hosting provider is completely irrelevant as far as Comcast is concerned.
If you're using a different transit provider (e.g., Cogent), then Cogent and Comcast will have a mutual peering agreement that accounts for imbalances in transfer. These details are very complicated, proprietary, and you should never need to care about them. That's the whole point of the internet; you connect to "the internet" and can treat it as a homogeneous network, whereas in reality it is actually a bunch of mutually-peered subnetworks.
>Cogent and Comcast will have a mutual peering agreement
Yeah that's what all these disputes are coming down to. I can brand myself an ISP and sell someone a 10G uplink. That doesn't magically make anyone have to peer with me. Yes it's complicated and yes it comes down to who can throw weight around.
It's even better/worse than that. If Comcast customers are requesting 1Gbps of traffic from your server, Comcast may need to buy transit to ensure those packets aren't dropped.
If the ISP was a customer buying bandwidth from Comcast like anyone else, then Comcast has zero obligation to increase their bandwidth for free.
If the ISP is Comcast, then when you pay for that 1Gbps uplink, you are paying Comcast and you have a right to expect that your packets will be delivered at that rate.
If the ISP is a peer of Comcast, then it seems like when you pay that ISP, you ought to know the exact details of the agreements and bandwidth arrangements between the ISP and Comcast, and both parties ought to abide by that contract. I don't know enough details in this case to know whether that's what happened.
Yeah I stopped reading at that point. An ISP with a history of interfering with certain traffic and lobbying against net neutrality is not a supporter of an open Internet at all, let alone the "strongest."
That's what's really bothered me about this whole thing--Comcast and the likes have already mastered their phrasing, and that bodes poorly for public perception of the issue. I've heard the term Open Internet used in that context several times in the last few days, and I think it's a part of a concerted effort to paint preferential traffic treatment as making the internet more "open for business". The hope is that rosy phrasing will "help" Joe Shmoe decide that the FCC's proposal is pro-consumer and pro-openness. They're not using the term in some cynical attempt to say that it ain't so, they're trying to actively re-define and capture it to form a cohesive narrative.
Myth: "No ISP in the country has been a stronger supporter of the Open Internet than Comcast[.]"
Fact: "Comcast spent the most money of any organization in support of the Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT IP bills, spending roughly $5 million to lobby for their passage."
Probably other CDNs like Akamai. The lack of transparency here is a big part of the problem, because it's hard to tell what is or is not a common industry practice if everything is covered in NDAs.
Netflix isn't complaining about peering directly. That's exactly what they want. They're complaining because according to anybody with common sense, that peering should be settlement-free.
Why would it be settlement free? Its just like any other peering agreement, If the data was symmetrical it would be free, but its not. Netflix is sending way more than its receiving.
If you were an ISP would you provide free transit to everyone? If you did, you would be out of business.
(The relevant quote is: "(1) [Transit Networks (e.g. Cogent)] carry traffic over long distances and (2) they provide access to every network on the global Internet. When Netflix connects directly to the Comcast network, Comcast is not providing either of the services typically provided by transit networks.")
Netflix is questioning the premise of your question by suggesting that Cogent and Comcast are _not_ providing the same service. I find the argument fairly compelling, though I'd be willing to hear counter-arguments.
Right, Comcast is providing transit to their customers, which the aforementioned transit providers could not adequately handle. Although it is not a typical transit network it is still the only route to Comcast customers.
So, if the existing backbone transit providers are not adequate, Netflix should be and needs to be covering the cost of the bandwidth when directly peered with Comcast. Otherwise the cost of this bandwidth is transferred to Comcast customers, all of which do not use the Netflix service.
It really comes down to this... Do all Comcast subscribers deserve to pay for bandwidth that is created by the minority that uses the Netflix service? I do not believe so. The cost should be with the Netflix, they create the overhead, they should pay for it.
Yeah, but here's the thing - if there's a connection point between cogent and comcast that is saturated, and it's degrading the netflix experience for comcast users, then netflix has incentive to pay for the upgrades (as if they can no longer provide adequate service to comcast, they'll lose customers), netflix's CDN providers have incentive (because otherwise they may lose netflix's business), and netflix's users have incentive. Maybe comcast would have more incentive if they had more competition, but they do not, but I think that issue is largely orthogonal.
There's no clear answer because there's a lot of competing and overlapping incentives here. But at the end of the day, if comcast has to foot the bill to improve quality for netflix customers, how is that fair to comcast customers that aren't using netflix? It is pretty sensible to think that Netflix users should be paying for Netflix service. If Netflix is selling me streaming video without also having a suitable CDN to get me that video, I suggest to you that they've sold me something they can't deliver on. If nobody can build that CDN because my ISP sucks and makes unreasonable terms, netflix should probably stop selling to users of my ISP.
This really reminds me of everyone who was complaining about UPS around the holidays for not delivering their amazon packages in time, even though UPS wasn't giving any shipping guarantees due to the peak demand. Amazon was still providing estimated arrival dates, however, but it turns out those weren't based on much (or at least, enough).
Certain statements in this communication regarding the alleged superfluity of disclaimers, including any statements regarding the expected length of such disclaimers, benefits and synergies of the disclaimers, future opportunities for the more disclaimers, and any other statements regarding future expectations, beliefs, plans, objectives, financial conditions, assumptions or future events or performance that are not historical facts are statements made within the meaning of RFC 1438.
I loved that the disclaimer was 2X the length of the blog post. Oh, and that they try to cram this into their anti-Netflix tweets by including the URL http://imprtnt.info which has a pdf of the same disclaimer.
ok lets not decide if the att link is valid, no one at comcast thought you know who we should align ourselves with att. Another ISP and telecom company that made the consumerist quarterfinals for worst company in america 2013
> Comcast has a multiplicity of other agreements just like the one Netflix approached us to negotiate, and so has every other Internet service provider for the last two decades.
I may just be ignorant here, but in what sense is Netflix an "Internet service provider?"
"Comcast, as well as every other ISP for the last two decades, has a multiplicity of agreements just like the one Netflix approached Comcast to negotiate."
The sentence "While it’s understandable for Netflix to try to make all Internet users pay for its costs of doing business"
should probably end with "we would like to shift some of our cost of doing business back to Netflix"
What angers me most is FCC and Comcast both are spinning this whole thing as "improving" net-neutrality while in reality is is plain, simple and naked "net anti-neutrality". They are obviously behind this push as lobbyist. Do they think people are complete idiot to buy off statements like charging content providers actually reduces their cost?
Yes, I believe that this is exactly what these corporations believe. They assume that the general public is too unaware of "how the sausage is made" to even know they are being duped. The average American, HN readers are not average, just want to come home from work to relax by not thinking. It's the same thing that happens when a network goes nuclear by pulling their content off of Comcast/DirecTV/etc. They count on the fact that average Americans just want the issue to go away so they can get back to watching Kardashians do what ever it is they do that make people want to watch.
NetFlix argument: Comcast is using its bully position to extra a toll from service providers and service subscribers. A Comcast-TwC merger would make it worse for Netflix and everyone else.
Comcast argument: Netflix is wrong. We bully all the content providers, not just Netflix. So, er, yeah, they're wrong.
The counterpoint is more in the first link than the actual article, but it is that the Comcast/Netflix relationship is not a website-ISP sort of relationship (the one where net neutrality comes into play), but an ISP-ISP peering relationship. In that relationship, ISPs have paid for peering agreements since the dawn of time.
Netflix chose to go down the route of basically becoming the backbone but isn't willing to accept that if they're an infrastructure provider they have to pay for infrastructure costs.
I could agree with that, but later they say that it's not fair that Comcast customers without Netflix pay for the bandwidth of Netflix users.
I understand that Netflix uses a lot of bandwidth, but what about heavy P2P users that have their traffic subsidized by other customers -- or any other site that is not used by all customers. That's how it works. Everyone pays for access for everyone (except there is tiered access so you are explicitly paying more if you are a heavy user), it's the same way health care works in Canada for the most part.
The problem (on both sides of the argument) is that there's conflation of the website-ISP relationship (i.e. should Comcast be allowed to throttle services/make "fast lanes" for certain services) and the provider-provider relationship (i.e. should Comcast allow other providers to get direct connection into their backbone?)
The agreements between Comcast and Netflix fall into the latter, but because people only think of Netflix as 'a bunch of servers connected to the internet', many don't realize that Netflix/Cogent has stuff inside the backbone, which is a different discussion.
A (shitty) analogy would be the difference between the post office charging me more in stamps depending on who I was when I want to send a letter (net neutrality), and the USPS charging me for the right to be able to have my own stuff inside the post-offices themselves and dropping stuff directly into the trucks.
How are we supposed to believe them when they say that "there is no need for us to engage in a point-counterpoint with Netflix"
If you won't challenge Netflix's argument, then it's your word against theirs. And one of those two companies isn't trying to become the largest ISP in the country.
"Internet interconnection has nothing to do with net neutrality; it’s all about Netflix wanting to unfairly shift its costs from its customers to all Internet customers, regardless of whether they subscribe to Netflix or not."
Really it's Comcast's customers who are using Netflix and those customers are paying them for an X Mbps connection. I don't see what difference it makes if the data comes from Netflix or some other source. It sounds like what Comcast really wants are data caps for their users but those don't do well with consumers. Instead they're targeting the largest content suppliers.
If you're willing to hand off traffic to Comcast at any and all points of their choosing (aka cold-potato routing), then I'd say you should get free peering because you're doing Comcast such a favor.
> With this logic, why should anyone have to pay for hosting bandwidth?
Because you still have to get the traffic from the datacenter to the peering point. That's what you're buying when you pay for hosting bandwidth -- transit. You're paying somebody to get the traffic to all the networks in the whole world.
The last mile provider isn't providing transit. You peer with them at their facility. The connection from their customers to their facility was paid for by their customers. The connection from their facility to yours is provided by you (or by the actual transit provider you paid). So what would you be paying them for?
It's nothing but a monopoly rent you have to pay because there is no other way to reach their customers.
So, if Netflix just increases data that viewers are sending it, it's okay?
So if Netflix adds
setInterval('EqualizeBandwidth',1000/24)
function EqualizeBandwidth(){
$.post('netflix.com/dosbox', {data:randomLongStringEqualtoVideoFrame+1});
}
Then comcast will pay them. (And most subscribers will be fine if they only watch < 31 movies a month given an 8gb movie.)
But bonus if netflix causes every one of their customers to hit the 250gb cap and therefore hate comcast. Any politician that has family trying to watch netflix would complain of overages then and shut comcast out.
>It sounds like what Comcast really wants are data caps for their users but those don't do well with consumers. Instead they're targeting the largest content suppliers.
This is exactly the issue. The ISPs got themselves into a corner. They created a market of unlimited plans and can't back out from that, so can't charge more to their own heavy users who are the cause of the need for network upgrades. Since a lot of that heavy use is of paid services, they figure they can go after that money pool instead.
I'm not too versed in this argument, so could someone please explain why Netflix's activities aren't covered by the normal peering agreements that make the "internet backbone" work? Doesn't Netflix pay it's ISP appropriately which gets disseminated by the other ISPs the traffic gets routed through?
* Netflix cannot make money if individual Internet users cannot connect to Netflix and stream their movies. Netflix brings in a lot of revenue from its customers, and even after the cost of its own Internet connection manages to turn a handsome profit.
* ISPs stand between Netflix and their users. Many ISPs, such as Comcast, are also involved in the business of selling subscriptions to TV channels (usually with plans that require people to pay for hundreds of channels they do not watch) -- a business that is dying because of Internet streaming. Since Netflix relies on ISPs to have customers at all, ISPs want to demand money from Netflix (as well as from their customers).
* Somewhere in there are the actual users of Netflix, who have no particular say in any of this. Most of those users would have been happier with BitTorrent, but are too terrified of lawsuits (and even if they did turn to torrents, certain ISPs -- i.e. Comcast -- have been known to deliberately interfere with their customers' traffic to thwart torrents).
If your reading of this is, "ISPs are greedy and want to double-dip," well, yeah, that's what is happening here.
Netflix doesn't have a "primary ISP", they are a network. They would like to freely peer to networks and ISPs that they can physically reach (e.g.: US ISPs), and they are happy to pay carriers for transit, that is bringing their traffic elsewhere in the world where they don't have a physical presence.
Most large ISPs won't freely peer with Netflix though; that's actually an industry standard, because peering is usually regulated by some kind of traffic balance between packets entering and exiting the network; e.g.: network A will peer with network B is they both exchange similar amounts of traffic in both directions. In Netflix case, it's obvious that this is impossible.
In those cases, Netflix would rely on paying the transit service; that is, they pay Cogent to bring their traffic into Comcast, because Comcast and Cogent already have some (secret) agreement in place (either feee or paid peer, who knows); Netflix would be happy to just pay Cogent to reach Comcast users. They would call it "a compromise" because their best option would be to freely peer with Comcast, but again, it's been an industry standard forever that peering is not only a factor of physical connection, but also of commercial power and quantity of packets sent and received (who needs to send more is the one that has to pay).
Netflix is now saying that Comcast is deliberately letting their peering with Cogent saturate and refusing to upgrade it (or offering economic conditions that Cogent won't accept, which is the same). This way, Netflix must enter a direct (paid) peering agreement with Comcast, to be able to offer good quality to Comcast users; in that agreement, Comcast will let Netflix pay whatever they see fit to reach their users. The peering here would obviously be paid and not free, since (again) there is a strong disproportion between packets going in/out the network.
If Netflix were to make their users' devices upload as much data as they download (even junk data which would be discarded at by their edge routers), would they solve the problem of the in/out data imbalance, and thereby be able to take advantage of free peering (with no bandwidth cap) with Comcast?
I suspect this wouldn't be the case, and the outcome would still be about their bargaining position and the negotiation process.
Can anyone with knowledge of these types of negotiations comment?
Well, that would be cheating, and Comcast would refuse to be cheated. But let's talk of a hypothetical P2pflix that is a video service with almost balanced up/down packets generated by end users.
For p2pflix, such negotiations would be far easier. The reason is that Comcast would need to somehow send those packets into p2pdflix network (they can't flat out refuse to deliver them in a net neutrality environment, or people would complain that the Internet is broken) so the alternative would be to pay a carrier that then peers with p2pflix. So instead of both paying their carriers, they might come into an agreement to do a free peering.
Peering is exactly that: when network A realizes that it's paying carrier C1 too much for traffic going into network B, they call B on the phone and ask for a free peering; network B checks how much they're paying carrier C2 to bring traffic into network A, and afterwards agrees to peer for a certain amount (e.g.: 4Gbps). They choose a data center where they both have a presence, setup a router with 4Gbps routing power, and reconfigure their BGP routes. Done, and the bills with their respective carriers go down, and everybody is happy.
If there is some disproportion, a paid peering might be negotiated; one of the two network would still be paying, but stil a lot less. Say network A is sending 4Gbps into network B, and network B is sending 6Gbps into network A. They can either free peer for 4Gbps (plus B would balance the extra 2Gbps through a carrier to reach A), or B might agree to pay directly A to have up to 6Gbps of peering, paying only the extra 2Gbps. Even assuming that the price per gig is the same of the carrier (and it's usually lower), it's still a good deal for both parts.
The problems happen with YouTube and Netflix because they don't have this negotiation power with ISPs, because they have a very big monodirectional flow of traffic. Let's also remember that on top of being monodirectional, the absolute amount of traffic is staggering: together, they make something like 45% of the TOTAL US TRAFFIC.
Netflix says that Comcast is letting their peering with Cogent saturate, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't be surprised if Comcast measured that 90% of that peering is being used for Netflix traffic. Otherwise, they wouldn't let it saturate because not only they would disrupt Netflix traffic for their users, but also any other website traffic that happens to be delivered through Cogent. (Well actually I guess Comcast doesn't really care that much about their quality of service to end users, but you get my point).
To me, it's not a clear cut. Obviously Netflix is a good and nice company providing a disrupting service we all love, and Comcast is a big bad ISP with monopolistic control on access in most zones and doing big profits with shitty service. So well, it's kind of easy to side, but I wouldn't say that Comcast's requests of being paid directly by Netflix is totally unreasonable, given the way the Internet has always worked up until now.
When the traffic flow was Netflix->Cogent->Comcast, peering didn't really come into it because both Netflix and Comcast were transit customers of Cogent. When Comcast is a customer, they get to decide how much pipe to pay for, and in this case they decided to pay for not nearly enough bandwidth to handle their customers' demand for Netflix.
The Netflix article that's also on the HN front page right now has a good diagram showing how they work with all other ISPs vs. how Comcast insists that they work with Comcast:
"
I call BS Comcast, You had larger transit networks in place and refused to activate them until Netflix paid. That has nothing to do with costs to consumers. They are just murdering your antiquated business model and you keep crying foul. Fios is a much better product than anything you offer."
It is currently being moderated by "Comcast Voices", lets see how much they support a Open Internet.
Particularly because the comments on the AT&T page by its own customers completely demolish the argument.
These ISPs are seriously arguing that the cost to upgrade their own networks to deliver the content their own customers are requesting should fall on the other side of the link. They're arguing this apparently even after Netflix/Akamai/etc have build CDNs to deliver the content right next to their subscribers. They're not even having to build a backbone.
The Comcast argument that "Netflix [...] try to make all Internet users pay for its costs of doing business" reads to me like, "We can't actually offer everyone the bandwidth we have sold them so we either have to raise our rates or charge the largest content providers in order to keep our profit margins."
There may be one, but this isn't a very compelling argument as to why large content providers should need to pay Comcast.
They get raked over the coals (and rightly so, IMHO), by people pointing out that they already pay for their bandwidth, so why should they pay twice (once through AT&T and once through the costs Netflix would have to pass through to them).
It really seems like AT&T and Comcast are complaining that people are actually starting to demand the full service that they pay for. It is really hard to take that argument seriously.
Looks like Comcast left their comment section open too, although you have to scroll past the 2 large paragraphs of legal matters to get to the comments.
I thought it was interesting that they have more legal content than actual content on the post.
Comcast gets paid IN 3 WAYS FOR THE SAME CONTENT, AT LEAST.
1. They get tax money to subsidize their infrastructure costs.
2. They sell the utility their infrastructure provides.
3. They sell the ability for content creators to create content, that they again sell to their users.
They get paid to build a distribution channel, and then charge people the ability to create and distribute content through their stream, then charge for the content. Also, they have no competitors.
110 comments
[ 3.1 ms ] story [ 194 ms ] threadI'm sorry Comcast but if you can't fullfil our agreement (Internet access) then you aren't an ISP in my mind. I pay you for an Internet connection, not for the ability to send packets at someone else -- they get to respond to me as well, that's part of our deal.
What Comcast is being chastised for, the thing that forced Netflix to transit with them directly, is being paid by its customers to connect to the internet, then refusing to use that money to buy a pipe large enough to deliver that. It wasn't Netflix that wasn't buying a large enough pipe to send its own bits. If Comcast had resolved its disputes with Cogent and widened the pipe to meet the customer demand it's being paid by those customers to meet, I'm sure Netflix would've been happy to stick with its ISP.
It's just like the telephone network of yore, no single trunk was ever capacitied to mothers day call traffic - there were reroutes, and more than one path to any large point, so you'd get a lower quality of service, but the traffic would still get thru.
I am fine with getting less than my maximum speed; I understand that the connection is shared and that my neighbors' service can interfere with mine. TCP can deal with congestion. What grinds my gears is that ISPs are not content to sell me a maximum speed; they want to oversubscribe, then claim that they are selling burst service, then call it "unlimited super-awesome Internet!! 15Mbps!!" then penalize customers who fail to limit their use of the supposedly unlimited service.
google has similar issues with some EU providers in particular in france, for youtube.
traditionally the ISP pays to upgrade the pipes for the content that is provided by a third party (ie ISP pays for youtube, netflix traffic). ie the one whos downloading pays for upgrading pipes.
thats where some ISPs (comcast too then i guess?) generally cringe: this way of dividing costs was ok 10 years ago, but not anymore: streaming is 90% of their traffic and its not sustainable.
So it's more like saying "downloading is 90% of their traffic and its not sustainable."
If you're trying to optimize for efficient use of limited bandwidth, unicast transferring of identical content to many many people is pretty wasteful. I think Netflix would argue that network links should be getting bigger and fatter to render the point moot, but given the streams are also getting bigger (we didn't always stream 720p everywhere, did we?) that would certainly take a lot more investment than what's happening now.
The problem is, what happens when you connect a new customer. Well, simple :
1) the income of the ISP increases by some fixed amount
2) the cost of providing this connection increases by n+1 (the number of existing customers)
So here's the catch
np needs to pay for n(n-1)c pipes
Where n is the number of customers on the internet. P is the average income per customer and c is the cost of a pipe that will sustain one customer.
Needless to say, this won't work.
No retail ISP on this planet offers 1:1 ratio like that to its general subscribers.
You can certainly buy uncontended service, but it will start at several hundred dollars per month for about 2 Mbps.
If your hosting company has paid Comcast for 100Mbps transit, then Comcast should honor that agreement with your hosting company. Your uplink to your hosting provider is completely irrelevant as far as Comcast is concerned.
If you're using a different transit provider (e.g., Cogent), then Cogent and Comcast will have a mutual peering agreement that accounts for imbalances in transfer. These details are very complicated, proprietary, and you should never need to care about them. That's the whole point of the internet; you connect to "the internet" and can treat it as a homogeneous network, whereas in reality it is actually a bunch of mutually-peered subnetworks.
Yeah that's what all these disputes are coming down to. I can brand myself an ISP and sell someone a 10G uplink. That doesn't magically make anyone have to peer with me. Yes it's complicated and yes it comes down to who can throw weight around.
If the ISP is Comcast, then when you pay for that 1Gbps uplink, you are paying Comcast and you have a right to expect that your packets will be delivered at that rate.
If the ISP is a peer of Comcast, then it seems like when you pay that ISP, you ought to know the exact details of the agreements and bandwidth arrangements between the ISP and Comcast, and both parties ought to abide by that contract. I don't know enough details in this case to know whether that's what happened.
Fact: "Comcast spent the most money of any organization in support of the Stop Online Piracy and PROTECT IP bills, spending roughly $5 million to lobby for their passage."
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Comcast#Lobbying_and_electoral_...
They are willing to do this because the transit providers can not handle their traffic efficiently. So why is Netflix complaining?
If you were an ISP would you provide free transit to everyone? If you did, you would be out of business.
ISPs are being paid for transit to their end users _by their end users_.
(The relevant quote is: "(1) [Transit Networks (e.g. Cogent)] carry traffic over long distances and (2) they provide access to every network on the global Internet. When Netflix connects directly to the Comcast network, Comcast is not providing either of the services typically provided by transit networks.")
Netflix is questioning the premise of your question by suggesting that Cogent and Comcast are _not_ providing the same service. I find the argument fairly compelling, though I'd be willing to hear counter-arguments.
So, if the existing backbone transit providers are not adequate, Netflix should be and needs to be covering the cost of the bandwidth when directly peered with Comcast. Otherwise the cost of this bandwidth is transferred to Comcast customers, all of which do not use the Netflix service.
It really comes down to this... Do all Comcast subscribers deserve to pay for bandwidth that is created by the minority that uses the Netflix service? I do not believe so. The cost should be with the Netflix, they create the overhead, they should pay for it.
There's no clear answer because there's a lot of competing and overlapping incentives here. But at the end of the day, if comcast has to foot the bill to improve quality for netflix customers, how is that fair to comcast customers that aren't using netflix? It is pretty sensible to think that Netflix users should be paying for Netflix service. If Netflix is selling me streaming video without also having a suitable CDN to get me that video, I suggest to you that they've sold me something they can't deliver on. If nobody can build that CDN because my ISP sucks and makes unreasonable terms, netflix should probably stop selling to users of my ISP.
This really reminds me of everyone who was complaining about UPS around the holidays for not delivering their amazon packages in time, even though UPS wasn't giving any shipping guarantees due to the peak demand. Amazon was still providing estimated arrival dates, however, but it turns out those weren't based on much (or at least, enough).
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I may just be ignorant here, but in what sense is Netflix an "Internet service provider?"
"Comcast, as well as every other ISP for the last two decades, has a multiplicity of agreements just like the one Netflix approached Comcast to negotiate."
NetFlix argument: Comcast is using its bully position to extra a toll from service providers and service subscribers. A Comcast-TwC merger would make it worse for Netflix and everyone else.
Comcast argument: Netflix is wrong. We bully all the content providers, not just Netflix. So, er, yeah, they're wrong.
Netflix chose to go down the route of basically becoming the backbone but isn't willing to accept that if they're an infrastructure provider they have to pay for infrastructure costs.
This is what I got from the argument at least.
I understand that Netflix uses a lot of bandwidth, but what about heavy P2P users that have their traffic subsidized by other customers -- or any other site that is not used by all customers. That's how it works. Everyone pays for access for everyone (except there is tiered access so you are explicitly paying more if you are a heavy user), it's the same way health care works in Canada for the most part.
The agreements between Comcast and Netflix fall into the latter, but because people only think of Netflix as 'a bunch of servers connected to the internet', many don't realize that Netflix/Cogent has stuff inside the backbone, which is a different discussion.
A (shitty) analogy would be the difference between the post office charging me more in stamps depending on who I was when I want to send a letter (net neutrality), and the USPS charging me for the right to be able to have my own stuff inside the post-offices themselves and dropping stuff directly into the trucks.
If you won't challenge Netflix's argument, then it's your word against theirs. And one of those two companies isn't trying to become the largest ISP in the country.
Really it's Comcast's customers who are using Netflix and those customers are paying them for an X Mbps connection. I don't see what difference it makes if the data comes from Netflix or some other source. It sounds like what Comcast really wants are data caps for their users but those don't do well with consumers. Instead they're targeting the largest content suppliers.
With this logic, why should anyone have to pay for hosting bandwidth?
Because you still have to get the traffic from the datacenter to the peering point. That's what you're buying when you pay for hosting bandwidth -- transit. You're paying somebody to get the traffic to all the networks in the whole world.
The last mile provider isn't providing transit. You peer with them at their facility. The connection from their customers to their facility was paid for by their customers. The connection from their facility to yours is provided by you (or by the actual transit provider you paid). So what would you be paying them for?
It's nothing but a monopoly rent you have to pay because there is no other way to reach their customers.
So if Netflix adds
setInterval('EqualizeBandwidth',1000/24) function EqualizeBandwidth(){ $.post('netflix.com/dosbox', {data:randomLongStringEqualtoVideoFrame+1}); }
Then comcast will pay them. (And most subscribers will be fine if they only watch < 31 movies a month given an 8gb movie.)
But bonus if netflix causes every one of their customers to hit the 250gb cap and therefore hate comcast. Any politician that has family trying to watch netflix would complain of overages then and shut comcast out.
This is exactly the issue. The ISPs got themselves into a corner. They created a market of unlimited plans and can't back out from that, so can't charge more to their own heavy users who are the cause of the need for network upgrades. Since a lot of that heavy use is of paid services, they figure they can go after that money pool instead.
* Netflix cannot make money if individual Internet users cannot connect to Netflix and stream their movies. Netflix brings in a lot of revenue from its customers, and even after the cost of its own Internet connection manages to turn a handsome profit.
* ISPs stand between Netflix and their users. Many ISPs, such as Comcast, are also involved in the business of selling subscriptions to TV channels (usually with plans that require people to pay for hundreds of channels they do not watch) -- a business that is dying because of Internet streaming. Since Netflix relies on ISPs to have customers at all, ISPs want to demand money from Netflix (as well as from their customers).
* Somewhere in there are the actual users of Netflix, who have no particular say in any of this. Most of those users would have been happier with BitTorrent, but are too terrified of lawsuits (and even if they did turn to torrents, certain ISPs -- i.e. Comcast -- have been known to deliberately interfere with their customers' traffic to thwart torrents).
If your reading of this is, "ISPs are greedy and want to double-dip," well, yeah, that's what is happening here.
Most large ISPs won't freely peer with Netflix though; that's actually an industry standard, because peering is usually regulated by some kind of traffic balance between packets entering and exiting the network; e.g.: network A will peer with network B is they both exchange similar amounts of traffic in both directions. In Netflix case, it's obvious that this is impossible.
In those cases, Netflix would rely on paying the transit service; that is, they pay Cogent to bring their traffic into Comcast, because Comcast and Cogent already have some (secret) agreement in place (either feee or paid peer, who knows); Netflix would be happy to just pay Cogent to reach Comcast users. They would call it "a compromise" because their best option would be to freely peer with Comcast, but again, it's been an industry standard forever that peering is not only a factor of physical connection, but also of commercial power and quantity of packets sent and received (who needs to send more is the one that has to pay).
Netflix is now saying that Comcast is deliberately letting their peering with Cogent saturate and refusing to upgrade it (or offering economic conditions that Cogent won't accept, which is the same). This way, Netflix must enter a direct (paid) peering agreement with Comcast, to be able to offer good quality to Comcast users; in that agreement, Comcast will let Netflix pay whatever they see fit to reach their users. The peering here would obviously be paid and not free, since (again) there is a strong disproportion between packets going in/out the network.
I suspect this wouldn't be the case, and the outcome would still be about their bargaining position and the negotiation process.
Can anyone with knowledge of these types of negotiations comment?
For p2pflix, such negotiations would be far easier. The reason is that Comcast would need to somehow send those packets into p2pdflix network (they can't flat out refuse to deliver them in a net neutrality environment, or people would complain that the Internet is broken) so the alternative would be to pay a carrier that then peers with p2pflix. So instead of both paying their carriers, they might come into an agreement to do a free peering.
Peering is exactly that: when network A realizes that it's paying carrier C1 too much for traffic going into network B, they call B on the phone and ask for a free peering; network B checks how much they're paying carrier C2 to bring traffic into network A, and afterwards agrees to peer for a certain amount (e.g.: 4Gbps). They choose a data center where they both have a presence, setup a router with 4Gbps routing power, and reconfigure their BGP routes. Done, and the bills with their respective carriers go down, and everybody is happy.
If there is some disproportion, a paid peering might be negotiated; one of the two network would still be paying, but stil a lot less. Say network A is sending 4Gbps into network B, and network B is sending 6Gbps into network A. They can either free peer for 4Gbps (plus B would balance the extra 2Gbps through a carrier to reach A), or B might agree to pay directly A to have up to 6Gbps of peering, paying only the extra 2Gbps. Even assuming that the price per gig is the same of the carrier (and it's usually lower), it's still a good deal for both parts.
The problems happen with YouTube and Netflix because they don't have this negotiation power with ISPs, because they have a very big monodirectional flow of traffic. Let's also remember that on top of being monodirectional, the absolute amount of traffic is staggering: together, they make something like 45% of the TOTAL US TRAFFIC.
Netflix says that Comcast is letting their peering with Cogent saturate, and that's probably true, but I wouldn't be surprised if Comcast measured that 90% of that peering is being used for Netflix traffic. Otherwise, they wouldn't let it saturate because not only they would disrupt Netflix traffic for their users, but also any other website traffic that happens to be delivered through Cogent. (Well actually I guess Comcast doesn't really care that much about their quality of service to end users, but you get my point).
To me, it's not a clear cut. Obviously Netflix is a good and nice company providing a disrupting service we all love, and Comcast is a big bad ISP with monopolistic control on access in most zones and doing big profits with shitty service. So well, it's kind of easy to side, but I wouldn't say that Comcast's requests of being paid directly by Netflix is totally unreasonable, given the way the Internet has always worked up until now.
https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7642545
" I call BS Comcast, You had larger transit networks in place and refused to activate them until Netflix paid. That has nothing to do with costs to consumers. They are just murdering your antiquated business model and you keep crying foul. Fios is a much better product than anything you offer."
It is currently being moderated by "Comcast Voices", lets see how much they support a Open Internet.
http://www.attpublicpolicy.com/consumers-2/who-should-pay-fo...
Particularly because the comments on the AT&T page by its own customers completely demolish the argument.
These ISPs are seriously arguing that the cost to upgrade their own networks to deliver the content their own customers are requesting should fall on the other side of the link. They're arguing this apparently even after Netflix/Akamai/etc have build CDNs to deliver the content right next to their subscribers. They're not even having to build a backbone.
There may be one, but this isn't a very compelling argument as to why large content providers should need to pay Comcast.
They get raked over the coals (and rightly so, IMHO), by people pointing out that they already pay for their bandwidth, so why should they pay twice (once through AT&T and once through the costs Netflix would have to pass through to them).
It really seems like AT&T and Comcast are complaining that people are actually starting to demand the full service that they pay for. It is really hard to take that argument seriously.
I thought it was interesting that they have more legal content than actual content on the post.
Presumably "0 comments" is simply the number of comments that portray Comcast in a reasonable light?
Yeah, I love the fact that the boilerplate disclaimers are well over twice the length of the actual post.
2. They sell the utility their infrastructure provides.
3. They sell the ability for content creators to create content, that they again sell to their users.
They get paid to build a distribution channel, and then charge people the ability to create and distribute content through their stream, then charge for the content. Also, they have no competitors.