Time Warner Defends Comcast In Level 3 Dispute 315
MojoKid writes "On December 21, the FCC will finally vote on adopting net neutrality rules. This may (or may not) have been caused by Comcast's spat with Level 3 after Level 3 won a big contract to handle Netflix's video streaming. Grind it all together, output it to Facebook and you get this campaign: 'Save the Internet: Stop Comcast from Blocking Netflix. Without strong net neutrality rules, companies like Comcast can demand fees from innovative companies like Netflix in an attempt to choke consumer freedom and coerce users to adopt its own video services instead.' Comcast insists that this has nothing to do with blocking the upstart Netflix's business but about how much of Level 3's traffic it must carry before they get to send Level 3 a bill. Level 3's traffic has greatly increased thanks to Netflix. On Thursday, Comcast's frienemy, Time Warner, issued a statement of support for Comcast that explained the pro-cable provider side of the fight."
You forgot one link (Score:3, Informative)
... the one saying that Level 3's claims are complete bullshit and they have nothing to do with net neutrality
Here it is [techdirt.com]
Re:Peering Agreement (Score:4, Informative)
Don't they have some sort of peering agreement that covers this? Aren't they supposed to charge their peers, and their customers, more when their bandwidth usage goes up? Or am I missing something here? Obviously telcoms are greedy and will try to take whatever they can, but isn't there already a channel established for that?
Nope. You've got the gist of it.
Comcast and Level3 had a settlement free peering agreement based on a roughly 1:1 traffic exchange. Level3 now wants to send 5:1 more traffic to Comcast, meaning their settlement free peering agreement is no longer valid. Comcast is just trying to negotiate a new peering agreement.
Funnily enough, Level3 was in Comcast's EXACT position back in 2005 with Cogent. Cogent wanted to send more traffic than Level3 was sending, and Level3 said "Nope, no more settlement free agreement. Get out your wallet!"
Comcast has peering agreements with other CDN's, and Level3 wants to leverage their old peering agreement to bust into the CDN market here. They are trying to pass the cost of increasing their CDN presence off to Comcast and Comcast's customers rather than paying for it themselves.
If anything, consumers should be pissed at Level3, not Comcast, because this will directly increase Comcast's operating costs... and we all know those costs are passed on to the consumer.
Re:Peering Agreement (Score:5, Informative)
Peering agreements are what we typically see at back bone and transport level connections.
The bandwidth going either way is roughly even.
For example, if Level 3 wanted to get packets to an AT&T customer, and Comcast owned a network between those two points, Level 3 and Charter could have a peering agreement so that Level 3 could send data over Comcast's network and vice-verse. If Comcast is sending a lot more data out for transport over Comcast's network than Comcast is sending back, then there may be a fee included.
That's all fine and good. But, in this case, Level 3 isn't sending data to AT&T customers. They are sending data to Comcast's customers. Customers that requested the data. Level 3, being proactive for Netflix, is trying to get a direct connection to Comcast's network to reduce backbone data transfers. Even if this agreement falls apart, Level 3 will still be routing the data to Netflix, but it will be coming over an existing back bone connection. It will offer worse performance for Comcast's customers, and it would waste more bandwidth on the back bone.
This is a pretty clear case of Comcast taking two dips from the coffers. Once from the users who are paying for data to be transferred to them via Comcast's network, and again from Level 3 that is providing the requested data to Comcast.
-Rick
Re:Peering Agreement (Score:3, Informative)
If you have been following the details of this, yes they have existing agreements but they go like this..
If I provide content, and your users are consuming it, I don't pay you, your customers do as they are the content consumers. We work together making sure the pipes between us are big enough to keep up with demand without charge.
Comcast has changed it to:
If your content is really really popular and we need bigger connections between us, I am going to charge you for the larger connections on my side, because I am not charging enough for what my customers are consuming.
Re:Double Dipping? (Score:4, Informative)
That's the closest someone has come so far in this discussion, but it's not quite accurate. Comcast and Level3 had an agreement where basically they just swapped traffic for free. Each side sent approximately the same amount of traffic, so an even exchange seemed fair. Now that agreement is about to expire, and at the same time the numbers have changed significantly. Now Level 3 is sending significantly more traffic to Comcast than Comcast is sending back, so the previous "even swap" agreement no longer makes sense, since it's not, you know, even. Netflix and net neutrality really have nothing to do with any of this, and as much as it pains me to say this, I agree with Comcast (though I'll continue to pray that they die a slow death and then rot in hell for all eternity).
Re:Peering Agreement (Score:4, Informative)
Why will this increase Comcast's operating costs? It's not going to affect Comcast's customers Netflix usage, so their overall traffic won't go up, it'll just be coming from a different peer.
Re:Double Dipping? (Score:4, Informative)
Because that's how peering works. If you buy a connection from an ISP, or a socket in a datacenter, then you pay the upstream provider for bandwidth. They typically pay a big upstream provider for their connection. Sometimes, however, two networks will agree that it is mutually beneficial for them to be connected and so will agree to peer - i.e. neither pays the other for transit. The definition of a Tier 1 network is one that only has peering agreements, or agreements where others pay for transit (i.e. pays nothing for off-network traffic, and may be paid for it). A Tier 3 network is one that only has transit agreements (i.e. pays for all off-network traffic). A Tier 2 network is one somewhere in the middle, with a mixture of peering and transit agreements.
Typically, a peering agreement has an agreement that says that the amount of traffic flowing in one direction must be within some percentage of the amount flowing in the other direction. A lot of big ISPs have agreements like this, which are somewhere between a peering and a transit agreement - if the balance of traffic remains approximately equal, neither side pays, but if one side is sending more traffic to the other, then one side pays. Whether this counts as a peering or a transit agreement is largely based on which case is expected to be the most common.
In this case, L3 and Comcast have an agreement which regulates the amount of traffic that L3 can send to Comcast without paying. Recently, however, Netflix has moved from their previous network provider to L3. This has dramatically increased the amount of data that is flowing from L3 to Comcast, so L3 is liable to pay.
Normally, this would result in a fairly simple renegotiation of the peering or transit agreement, but because network neutrality is such a buzzwordy topic now, it's being spun as a network neutrality complaint, because Comcast operates a service that is vaguely similar to Netflix. All of the big networks and ISPs benefit from this, because it serves to muddy the waters surrounding network neutrality just as the FCC is about to rule on the issue, and detracts from the real issues at stake.
Presumably the aim is for L3 and Comcast to convince the FCC that this is what network neutrality means, and get them to impose network neutrality rules that require them to come to the same sort of transit agreement that they would normally have reached anyway. Then the FCC and the politicians can claim 'we did our part for network neutrality', ignorant voters are happy because their politician stood up for something that the media told them vaguely was important and in their interests, the ISPs are happy because there is no real regulation on network neutrality. The average customers and small businesses are fucked, but no one cares about them.
Re:Double Dipping? (Score:5, Informative)
You need to ask your government why there is a lack of competition in the ISP market in your country.
Network Neutrality is a non-issue used to cover up the real problem. It is only an issue at all in the USA.
Re:Double Dipping? (Score:4, Informative)
No, that's not quite how the Internet works. You're describing the legacy telecom interconnect that masquerades as the theory behind the Internet. In the old days, SS7 was used as the message to charge/clear/balance long distance calls and 'wire time'.
Comcast wants to make it tougher for Netflix to succeed over Xfinity offerings, because Xfinity competes directly at all levels with Netflix via Neflix's content delivery network/CDN, who is Level 3. Because the traffic is lopsided, e.g. downloads from L3 are huge, and the traffic from Comcast is small, Comcast feels they must charge for this imbalance.
In reality, the Internet was conceived with one of it's principals as equal access- meaning that if you stick a leg on to the network, your run whatever traffic in an unimpeded fashion, no matter what direction, what time of day, what protocols, etc. To help QoS, you might be nice and respect various QoS protocols so as to not screw up isochronous media types, like audio and video. But Comcast doesn't believe in that. They believe their cable system is unique and God-given, and therefore, the rules do not apply to them. Netflix/L3 caved, because if they didn't, your next flick w ou ld l ook li ke th is.
Re:Peering Agreement (Score:5, Informative)
Comcast and Level3 had a settlement free peering agreement based on a roughly 1:1 traffic exchange. Level3 now wants to send 5:1 more traffic to Comcast, meaning their settlement free peering agreement is no longer valid. Comcast is just trying to negotiate a new peering agreement.
It's a little more complicated than that.
Here's what the dispute is really about: The way the Internet works (obviously) is that you buy access from your ISP (e.g. Comcast), they in turn (perhaps through some number of additional intermediaries) buy access to the backbone from a Tier 1 provider (like Level 3). If you were a big enough network, you could 'peer' without paying anything (since there was no particular reason for one network to pay the other vs. vice versa). The way it worked in the Old Days was that data centers would always be uploading more than they download, so the rule of thumb became that if you upload too much data without downloading, you can't peer for free -- a rule of thumb to distinguish data centers from ISPs and make them pay. But it is unheard of for a backbone provider to pay an ISP -- because it is inefficient. ISPs like Comcast always used to have approximately symmetrical load to their uplink providers: Their customers would download more than they upload, which means they would have "surplus" upload bandwidth "for free" which they could sell to local data centers. Selling to data centers like this is efficient because otherwise the surplus upload bandwidth is lost -- use it or lose it.
Some of these data centers in modern times turned into CDNs like Akamai. The CDNs kind of messed with the model. Instead of connecting Comcast's network to buy Comcast's surplus upload bandwidth to the backbone, they connected to Comcast networks to serve content only to Comcast's customers. In other words, they evened out Comcast's uplink to Level 3, not by increasing upload traffic as was the traditional model, but by decreasing download traffic from the backbone. But that still works.
So now what's happening with Level 3? Netflix is moving from Akamai to a data center operated by Level 3 which is only connected to Comcast through Level 3's backbone. What this does from Comcast's perspective is a) deprive them of the money Akamai was paying them, but b) give them a huge amount of "free" upload bandwidth. What Comcast is then supposed to do is the efficient thing: to shop this surplus bandwidth around to data centers. Or sell Comcast Business customers higher upload rates. Or whatever. They're supposed to sell it, because they can sell it most efficiently -- there is a pipe going into Comcast which is only full in one direction and the only way to fill it is to put something which uploads a lot on the Comcast side.
Comcast apparently doesn't want to do that. I can really only think of two possible reasons for this: First, there is so much upload bandwidth that no one would possibly want to buy it. (I find this to be pretty unfathomable. Supply and demand says that if the price is right, someone will pay.) And second, Comcast is double dipping and trying to sell access to their customers as a scarce resource; in other words, trying to force Level 3 to pay more for the bandwidth than it would sell for on the open market because buying it from Comcast is the only way to get access to Comcast's customers and they want to charge monopoly prices.
Funnily enough, Level3 was in Comcast's EXACT position back in 2005 with Cogent. Cogent wanted to send more traffic than Level3 was sending, and Level3 said "Nope, no more settlement free agreement. Get out your wallet!"
No, Cogent was sending traffic over Level 3's network to third party networks. In this case Level 3 is sending traffic to Comcast customers. Level 3 has no monopoly on access to third party networks. There are other backbone providers. Comcast has a monopoly over access to Comcast customers -- that's what makes it different.
Re:Double Dipping? (Score:4, Informative)
I don't know what reality that is, but it's not ours. If you want to connect to someone else's network, you either pay or agree to a ratio of traffic. Once that deal is made, THEN, yes, you can send any kind of content you want.
Re:Double Dipping? (Score:5, Informative)
If Comcast doesn't like what Level3 is paying them to accept L3's traffic, they should renegotiate.
That is what this is about, Comcast is telling Level3 that they need to renegotiate their peering agreement because Level3 is about to significantly increase the amount of traffic they send over Comcast's network. Netflix used to use Akamai as one of their primary ISPs. Akamai paid Comcast for the traffic they sent to Comcast's network. Level3 had a peering agreement with Comcast whereby they didn't pay to send traffic to Comcast because Comcast sent as much traffic to Level3's network as Level3 sent to Comcast's. That is about to change with Netflix switching from Akamai to Level3. Level3 is screaming because they undercut Akamai's price to provide service to Netflix on the basis of not paying Comcast to send data to Comcast's customers.
This has nothing to do with Netflix competing with Comcast (at leat not that anyone has so far offered any evidence for), this is about Level3 increasing the amount of traffic they send over Comcast's network without a similar increase in the amount of traffic that Comcast sends over Level3's network.
Re:Double Dipping? (Score:4, Informative)
Oh I think it *is* a network neutrality issue.
Then you have no idea what network neutrality means, no idea what the issue at question is, or both.
From the Comcast customers point of view, traffic originating on L3's network is being discriminated against if Comcast stops accepting that traffic even though its destination is Comcast.
L3 is going from a 1:1 peering agreement to a 5:1 traffic ratio. Do you think that Comcast should just keep letting them pay nothing? If so, great for every other ISP - they can now get a cheaper deal from L3 than from Comcast to carry traffic to Comcast's customers and there's nothing that Comcast can do about it.
Allowing this sort of thing sets up an easy way for all consumer ISP's to discriminate, making its own services far more competitive than they would be had there been a level playing field.
Allowing what sort of thing? Depeering is something that has happened loads of times before in the history of the Internet, and quite a few times in the last few years. It happens whenever the traffic ratio between two peers suddenly shifts, as happened when L3 gained Netflix as a customer.
This has absolutely nothing to do with network neutrality. Comcast is not rejecting traffic because it comes from Netflix. Comcast is not rejecting traffic because it is streaming video. Comcast is threatening to reject traffic because it is not covered under their existing peering agreement and they want a new transit agreement. Any other company would have to get a similar agreement. Without the ability to form these agreements, the Internet would not function at all.
Re:Peering Agreement (Score:5, Informative)
Why will this increase Comcast's operating costs? It's not going to affect Comcast's customers Netflix usage, so their overall traffic won't go up, it'll just be coming from a different peer.
Akamai delivered Netflix (and other content) to Comcast's customers by buying colo rack space in Comcast's POPs and pulling in their own private lines. Level 3 is dumping the traffic onto Comcast at a much smaller number of peering points, thus Comcast has to use their long haul network to transport the traffic across the country instead of having it originate inside a POP nearer to it's final destination.