Netflix and Google Make Land Grab On Edge of Internet

An anonymous reader writes "In an end-run around slow Internet backbone providers, Netflix and Google (plus a dozen more large content giants) are in a bitter fight to deploy servers and dominate the consumer edge of the Internet. This Wired article provides some of the first graphics of this fight and how it is changing the underlying Internet infrastructure. The source of the article (DeepField blog post) also has some pretty interesting commentary."

I miss Ma Bell

[NoNonAlphaCharsHere]

If you look at the upper right corner of the building in TFA's picture, you can see the shadow of the old Bell System logo.

"changing the underlying Internet infrastructure"

[asshole felcher]

Seems a bit dramatic. Google and Netflix use enough bandwidth that they can set up their own CDN. End of Story. If a small competitor comes along, they won't have the money to set up their own CDN, but LLNW, Akamai, and Level3 won't turn them down.

Re:basically vertical integration with CDNs

[Trepidity]

Yeah, I agree with that. Google and Netflix are basically moving a commodity service in-house, which often makes sense once you're using enough of it. But others can continue to use the commodity service, as long as it continues to exist, which it looks like it will.

If anything, the basic way bandwidth is billed and peering agreements are arranged is a bigger problem for small players than the edge caches this story is trying to get us worried about. The first problem someone is going to have if they try to compete with YouTube is not CDN access, but the fact that they would have to pay for bandwidth, whereas in many cases Google doesn't. For example, I work at a university, and our university network has a peering agreement with Google: that means that all YouTube watching by students is free to Google. A YouTube-competitor startup would have to pay for transit.

Re:Why don't they...?

[icebraining]

The actual protocol is agnostic - the client can ask for whatever chunk he wants. Most clients follow a (seemingly) random pattern, but nowadays uTorrent has a button you can click to prioritize the first blocks, so that you can start watching the movie while it's still downloading.