I'm sorry to sound very negative on the author, but I don't know how you could have the knowledge to write this article, but not have the knowledge to understand the basics of costs on the Internet.

A few points that are horribly wrong FTA (reasoning explained below):

"In order to use as few network resources as possible—both to keep costs low and quality high—these providers typically attempt to get as “close” as possible to end users, often forging agreements in which they directly connect to provider networks."

The "close"-ness that they are talking about here is not geographic closeness but network closeness. And this isn't just in terms of the distance traveled geographically, but the cost to send that traffic across some other network. That is, it is more expensive for Netflix to send traffic from their provider to (for example) AT&T to Sprint to Comcast to you, than it is to have Level3 send traffic from Level3 to Comcast to you. In fact, because of the peering agreement between Level3 and Comcast, Comcast has to pay Level3 to send them traffic (or so I believe).

The cost is not how many links it has to traverse, but the cost of the peering agreement that that network has with where it is sending the traffic.

"The only appreciable differences between the Xfinity streaming service for Xbox and e.g., Netflix, are that the source of content is within the Comcast’s “internal” CDN instead of on a third-party CDN, and that Comcast requires you to be using their own Internet service. (This is much more likely related to their agreements with content owners rather than any technical reason.) "

This is wrong. The reason is entirely financial. It is cheaper for Comcast to send traffic only within their network. If I traveled to China, it would cost Comcast much more to send the traffic to China and almost nothing to send the traffic to my computer which is Comcast's network.

"As you’ll see, the cap-exempt content is likely even more expensive for Comcast to deliver than the third party content!"

"All of these third-party streams almost certainly originate from third party providers in the Bay Area, all via direct connections to Comcast. Even though they count against my bandwidth cap, they almost certainly traverse fewer fiber route-miles and physical router ports (Comcast’s two primary costs of delivery) than the stream which originated in Seattle(!) and does not count against my cap."

Completely wrong.. Even though it is a further distance away, sending traffic from Seattle to somewhere in California is almost no cost to Comcast, so long as it stays within their network. With retrieving content from Level3 (such as Netflix movies), it has to _pay_ Level3 to send them traffic that its users want.

Again, sorry to bash on the author so much, but the author was misinformed concerning cost. Also, DSCP is kind of meaningless when traveling between networks (any network router can overwrite them and change their priority).