Internet Transit Provider Claims ISPs Deliberately Allow Port Congestion 210
An anonymous reader writes "Level 3, an internet transit provider, claimed in a recent blog post that six ISPs that it regularly does business with have refused to de-congest most of their interconnect ports. 'Congestion that is permanent, has been in place for well over a year and where our peer refuses to augment capacity.' Five of the six ISPs that Level 3 refers to are in the U.S., and one is in Europe. Not surprisingly, 'the companies with the congested peering interconnects also happen to rank dead last in customer satisfaction across all industries in the U.S. Not only dead last, but by a massive statistical margin of almost three standard deviations.' Ars Technica reports that ISPs have also demanded that transit providers like Level 3 pay for access to their networks in the same manner as fringe service providers like Netflix."
What Level 3 can do (Score:5, Interesting)
Is just to cut the connection to those ISPs and see how long they will be around.
Re:What Level 3 can do (Score:5, Interesting)
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I can just imagine what a 'dark day' would do to those ISPs
I'm not so sure about that. My guess is that the ISPs being referenced are themselves Tier 1 ISPs and don't rely on peering with Level(3) for anything other than connectivity to L3's own customers. They probably already peer with everyone else worth peering with, separately. So cutting that connection would probably hurt L3's customers far more than the other way around... which, I would guess, is the whole reason these ISPs aren't in a hurry to upgrade their connectivity to L3 in the first place: L3 has no
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You do know that Level3 is far from a MonNPop, yes?
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Thanks, I am aware that Level(3) is not a mom-and-pop shop. But their market clout is still nothing compared to the largest consumer broadband ISPs and traditional Tier 1 networks, which in many cases globally are one and the same.
Think about it: the big guys have their own peering relationships that go around L3, and most L3 customers (unless they are mom-and-pops themselves) get transit from more than one provider. So let's say Webhost X buys transit from L3 and Sprint. $BIGISP already peers with both L3
Re:What Level 3 can do (Score:5, Insightful)
It is a bit karmic. I'm not claiming that L3 are just a great bunch of guys fighting the man or anything.
However, L3 is a Tier 1. They have many massive datacenters for colo as well as an international network. The only thing they don't have is last mile networking.
A fair bit of the internet would either go away or get much more expensive to reach if L3 cut off peering.
Re:What Level 3 can do (Score:5, Interesting)
Is just to cut the connection to those ISPs and see how long they will be around.
But why are they peering with them if there are better routes available?
The incentive structure on all these things is wrong. One neat thing the bitcoin network does is to attach a fee to each transaction that occurs (which is due to be reduced to reasonable levels soon - pay attention...).
There's too much turmoil going on in Internet routing with regard to pricing now. Some sort of BGP extension that includes transit cost has to come along to make it all automatic and lowest-cost. It's really not much different than how power producers will bring capacity online when the market demands or when they have excess capacity they need to get rid of. The dam near me has a realtime market price terminal they watch to see when to open the gates, but Internet providers would just automate the whole thing, and then the transit pricing wars would shake out. I wouldn't mind seeing it extended to the last mile either, though with monopoly protection in place there would need to be some very reasonable connection fee floor and controls on fees, since competition can't impose those controls. But one of the ways we encourage lowest-cost is with efficient protocols and there's very little incentive to demand that from the end user right now.
Re:What Level 3 can do (Score:5, Insightful)
But why are they peering with them if there are better routes available?
ISPs hold a monopoly on their customers, there is no other way to get to their network.
Re:What Level 3 can do (Score:4, Insightful)
ISPs only have customers because of peerage agreements that let their customers get to the rest of the internet.
Any two-bit ISP (and in this context, that includes even the likes of Comcast) that thinks they can twist L3's arm has one hell of a nasty surprise waiting for them when their current contracts expire. This doesn't work quite the same as not getting to see this week's episode of Glee because of a pissing contest between cable companies and content providers - A week where Comcast customers can't get to Por... er... Google, means a week where Comcast loses half its customer base.
Re:What Level 3 can do (Score:5, Insightful)
90% of comcast customers are held hostage, they CANT GO ANYWHERE ELSE for internet.
This is what happens when you have a government sponsored and allowed monopoly.
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In my market, this is getting shaken up. Qwest is expanding and doing quite well. When they did my street, I dumped Comcast, tripled my speed, and reduced my cost. I found no throttling, or blocked ports. I did test Comcast for the torrent throttling. 1st minute fine, 2nd minute about 1/2 speed, etc to where a file was totally stalled on a Linux ISO by the end of the day. FTP of the same file from a mirror was a 20 minute download.
Same test on Qwest is functional. I am running SIP phone service for 2
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I think it is already a priority. The trouble is they go about it in the wrong way. Instead of fixing the network, they pay more people to apologize for it and/or spin it to their benefit (as with Netflix.) A customer retention initiative from Comcast might get you a free month of service or the like, but who cares when the service itself is still broken?
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Well, it's a Government monopoly with no oversight.
Because practically speaking, you can't just let any yahoo with a garden trowel and some fiberoptic cables just start digging around everywhere, it's a freaking nightmare to do that.
If we had real oversight on telcos and cable cos, enforced fair sharing of infrastructure and had state and local Governments enforce rules that make sense... Then really, the problem goes away. Even better if the local municipalities installed the fiber and leased it out to the
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Well, it's a Government monopoly with no oversight.
It's not a monopoly, and there is government oversight. At least my city was smart enough not to grant an exclusive franchise, and they do have a staff member that deals with franchise issues. We're on a first-name basis, I've called him about the shenanigans of a certain non-monopoly cable company so many times.
Because practically speaking, you can't just let any yahoo with a garden trowel and some fiberoptic cables just start digging around everywhere, it's a freaking nightmare to do that.
That's why you have franchise agreements that grant access to the rights of way for a fee. The fact that not just anybody can "start digging" doesn't mean there is a monopoly, it just means there
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The post I was replying to was swinging towards the Libertarian side of things with no care for the nuance of why in some markets, the barrier to entry is really high if not impossible to break into.
With most markets, they are exclusive rights areas.
But, yes, your local municipality is also doing it right.
Probably better than the way I outlined it.
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This is what happens when you have a government sponsored and allowed monopoly
I always wondered about the decision-making that went into the FCC's rules on this topic. NPR's Planet Money actually did a really interesting podcast on this topic [npr.org] that explains precisely why the choices in the US are far more limited elsewhere. tl;dr version: the FCC had to make a choice between two (at the time) equally competing visions of the broadband market, and they picked the wrong one.
When the FCC was considering these rules, they had a choice between going with "telephone"-style rules that would
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Except that Comcast has no monopoly -- government allowed, government sponsored, or otherwise
They did in the very recent past. I'm not sure if they still have this, but in many areas, they had franchise agreements that allowed only one cable or telcom providers in an area for upwards of 10 years. Even without franchise agreements, around here, that have city ordinances that were voted on by the people to only allow one of each type of provider because people hate getting their lawns torn up every time a new provider wants to come in.
The problem with being a fixed line ISP, is you also need to get
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They did in the very recent past. I'm not sure if they still have this, but in many areas, they had franchise agreements that allowed only one cable or telcom providers in an area for upwards of 10 years.
In none of the cities I've been in for the last thirty years has there been an exclusive franchise agreement. If you know of one I can see online, point me to it. Any city that made such an agreement was a fool, and if any of them did then the problem isn't the cable company it was the local government that did the stupid thing.
But you clipped the statement I made before it ended and changed the meaning significantly. I said they had no monopoly "on the internet". They did not have one, they do not have o
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They often do have a functional monopoly on 'broadband' as defined by the government. In my case I'm in a Time Warner area that may or may not become part of Comcast when they merge (and I have no doubt they will get the ok). My other options are 1mb/512k ADSL (which is internet access, but not 'broadband') from Verizon or 3G internet access from a number of cell providers (4G does not currently exist in this market of over 100,000 people) which all have considerably low caps that make them nonfunctional as
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I need internet for streaming media, general internet access, email, cloud storage, and gaming. Only one company allows me to do that effectively and even if I did switch to a worse service I'd lose the ability to do some of those.
Oh noes! Whatever will you do? How would you survive?
No, you don't need those things. You would like to have them. You need air to breathe, water to drink, food to eat and shelter from the elements. You apparently already have the things that you need which allows you to worry about the things that you want.
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3G/4G is outrageously expensive and slow. The resellers aren't really competition since they are all reselling the very same service. All they can possibly do is add overhead and offer you more email accounts. Sattelite does OK for bulk download, but terrible for uplink and latency.
Many places have exactly 1 option that provides reasonable service. Many more have 2, but that's about it.
Meanwhile, the sort of competition that actually makes a market work calls for more than a dozen independent sellers.
Keep i
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Meh, just because you like your Comcast-sponsored assfucking does not mean everyone else does.
Meh, just because you see a statement that Comcast is not a monopoly doesn't mean it is loved. And thanks for expressing your opinion in a civil manner.
Let's break down your alternatives, shall we? None of what you mentioned happen to actually be broadband.
So, as I expected, the complaint is not that there is no other source of internet, it is there is no other source of internet that is as fast as you want it to be for a price that you want to pay. Sorry, that's not what "monopoly" means.
Sure you have other options, none of them really all that good.
So you admit that the monopoly on the internet is a fiction. Thanks.
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For most, there is no longer a monopoly (though that is a fairly new development), but it's hardly a vibrant market.
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No, they just drop Level3. Th
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You peer with Tier 2 ISPs like Level3
Level 3 is the single largest Tier 1 in the world, several factors larger than the 2nd largest, which is several factors larger than the 3rd largest. Level 3 is crazy big, but owning a multi-billion dollar backbone with razor thin low single digit margins means nothing compared to the trillion dollar last mile owned by incumbent ISPs who get large double digit margins on magnitudes larger revenues.
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Naturally, everyone wants to keep traffic on the "free" peering (i.e., same level), which works when traffic is roughly equal. The problem occurs when it isn't, in which case one side or the other has to pay up for the differential traffic. (If the traffic was truly equal, then both would upgrade the ports together because both sides are dropping packets).
Unless the peering includes transit, the whole balance thing is an entirely fabricated necessity made by business people who don't actually know how networking works.
Re:What Level 3 can do (Score:4, Insightful)
ISPs think that they offer "high speed", and they do, but only on the "last mile". They think that last mile is the only thing that counts as a metric.
What good is a phone call if you are unable to speak?
Congestion has always been the bigger underlying issue, because Comcast customers are clueless about what "high speed" means. The best thing Level 3 (and other peering companies like them) could be doing is running national TV advertizements announcing (without naming) that "slow internet" may not be a last mile problem. I could design a 30 second commercial that describes the issue.
"Yes, you do have high speed internet, however your ISP may not be able to deliver the promised speed".
And trust me, congested pipes are worse issue than appears on the surface. Once you hit that max, you start compounding the problem with duplicate (and beyond) packets needing to be resent because the first packet never go there. Once you get to that point, the ONLY solution is more and bigger pipes(series of tubes???) .
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I think I spotted the flaw in your logic, it is because of pricing that the rest of the internet must carry the burden. ISP's that Throttle, are the problem, and not in any solution.
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Most tier 2 providers already engage in this activity. I feel like Level 3 thinks they are a tier 1 provider and are finding out they are actually tier 2.
Ah, thanks. Reading a few of Level 3's blog posts, it sounds like they want to have free peering with everybody because that's maybe how it was back when BBN and MCI were working things out. The trouble with that is that it only works when everybody plays nice. When you can't count on all players to be nice, you need markets and competition. It sounds
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If changing your ISP involved nothing more than making a 5 minute phone call and getting your VLAN changed from Comcast to someone else, then there would be a reason to keep the
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THIS is the problem with allowing ISPs to have monopolies.
I'm not sure how you'd solve that problem. Do you imagine that most home users would be able to configure an adaptive router that determines the best route for their packets and sends them to ISP A sometimes and ISP B other times? That would create havoc with routing since you're trying to change not just an address of an intermediate router, you're changing the destination address. And imagine the fun if someone actually did have service from two ISPs and they somehow became an advertised route between th
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This isn't about peering in the strict sense of the word. Level 3 is a transit provider, a so-called tier 1 network. [wikipedia.org] Colloquially Level 3 is an internet backbone operator. The end-user ISPs don't have global networks and need other networks to pass data through in order to reach the entire internet. These ISPs buy transit from backbone providers, i.e. their peering is not settlement free. For an end-user ISP to unclog their "connection to the internet", they have to buy more bandwidth from the backbone prov
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What's happening is that last-mile providers are selling internet bandwidth that they in turn haven't bought from their upstream providers.
This has been true from the early days of even just the simple telephone system. Capacity costs money, and providers build enough capacity to handle normal volumes.
Back when telephones were "spin the crank and ask Mabel to connect you", the capacity limits were "one Mabel" and "one patchboard". You want Mabel to do something for you, but she may be busy with someone else. Too many people want to talk to each other, you run out of patch cords. And if more than one or two people wanted to talk "long distanc
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Nobody builds to peak loads because none of the customers want to pay what that would cost. A company that builds its systems for peak loads would have unused bandwidth most of the time, but someone has to pay for it.
Precisely this. I remember many Slashdot discussions of years past when people got all up in arms over the very concept of oversubscription. Networks - dating back to the PSTN as you point out - have never been built to address the peak capacity since most of the time that's a waste of everyone's money. It's like spending the money to build a 10-lane highway to solve for a two-lane road that has traffic jams only after the county fair and is fine the rest of the time. Or having enough food in your refrigera
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The cost of good networking hardware has fallen considerably over the years. Meanwhile, the ISPs marketing depts sure do like to hype all the things you can do with your 30 bazillion megabits unlimited connection. Alas, they sure do resent it when customers sign up and actually expect to get 10% of what marketing promised. They actually could afford the necessary build-out to provide what was promised an the price they charge, but then they wouldn't be able to afford to buy up multi-national content produce
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Yes, normal (i.e. practically occurring and recurring) peak volumes.
No, peak is not normal. That's why they call it peak and not normal.
But on the other hand, if you sell "up to 16Mbps" to your customers, and then your network or your peerings limit them to a lower speed, you need to upgrade.
So you're a small ISP and have 1000 customers, all of whom you've sold 16Mbps service to. That's a sum of 16Gbps if my math is right. But that's only if they ALL put the same, maximum demand on the system at the same time. You can be a socially responsible scrupulously honest business person and try to find a 16Gbps upstream connection and pay the money for it, charging your customers a premium for never hitting a bottleneck on your netwo
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The solution to accountants over-accounting is not additional accounting. Do you really want to get an itemized bill from 3 providers when you watch 'cute kitten video'?
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Practically nothing actually honors source quench anymore. It was too easy to use it for DOS.
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the largest senders of data on the internet, netflix and google already peer with the largest ISP's. if L3 de-peered from them what is that going to do?
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and how hard would it be to peer directly with verizon or comcast if they started to allow it? like they did with netflix?
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Is just to cut the connection to those ISPs and see how long they will be around.
Level3 is not your friend. They are in contract negotiations with those 6 providers. This was a shot across the ISPs bow to try and get them to agree to Level3's terms. Level3 has been in bed with Netflix for years. There is no massive conspiracy to keep you from watching netflix. There is, however, a massive conspiracy to change whos pocket your money ends up in. This is a propaganda war between the ISPs, Level3 and Netflix and the ISPs are loosing.
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they are losing the blogging war but not the money war
netflix is peering with comcast and verizon
google is peering with ISP's
figure the ISP's will start to peer with other content providers as well
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At the technical level, treat it as if it were "bufferboat", make sure your buffers are configured properly, and use an AQM algorithm like fq_codel. Doubly so if you're Level 3 or any other poor ISP connected to the culprits!
See http://gettys.wordpress.com/20... [wordpress.com]
NO COMPETITION -- NO INCENTIVE (Score:3, Interesting)
Why would the ISPs do this? They have no incentive. The correlation with customer service is a good thing to note, too. The American people are being bent over a barrel on this.
NO INCENTIVE -- NO VISION (Score:2)
You're giving ISP's a pass.
I agree, that yes, ISP's are so anti-user that they will do everything to nickel and dime them
However, it's wrong to just abdicate any notion of a public company having ***VISION*** to be a better/different company
Your comment is true, but it doesn't **have** to be...that's what you miss
short-term pass agreement (Score:2)
maybe i'm just arguing semantics, but here is where you give them a pass:
says who?
that's an honest question...how could we test the falsifiablility of your statement that "having vision is basically a non-starter"?
how can we know that is true? what conditions would have to be present?
is there something systemic that physically prevents a company from having vision and, as you say:
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take over their business?
20 years ago we had dozens of small ISP's and large backbone networks were needed to connect them
today we have a few huge ISP's. two of them are national wireless carriers with huge fiber backbone networks of their own to every corner of the USA. one of them is about to be a national network once they buy a competitor
5 years ago netflix had to peer with third party peering companies to distribute content. now Comcast and Verizon are connecting directly to Netflix at cheaper rates th
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Mathematical Certainty (Score:3)
ISP's like Comcast will do this with mathematical certainty....unless we regulate it.
They barely attempt to cover it up now...this is due to the fact that they are a publicly held corporation
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We should not even have to regulate this, the FTC needs to sue for not providing access to the internet as advertised.
cry of a dying business (Score:4, Insightful)
Level 3 has been awesome, but the ISP's now have national footprints and transit prices are dropping fast. Verizon and AT&T have it because of the wireless business. Comcast will be a national network once they buy time warner.
figure that as transit prices drop L3 and Cogent have to carry more and more data to pay the bills but they don't have enough money left to upgrade the links and want the ISP's to upgrade them. maybe the ISP's are being dicks and trying to run L3 and Cogent out of business by denying them more links and then taking their business like what happened with netflix
at this level there is no more need of transit providers as more and more content sellers will connect directly to the ISP's. so L3 and Cogent are crying network neutrality to save their business
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so?
netflix is now sending directly to comcast and verizon and that's a huge piece of revenue lost for L3 and Cogent
figure MLB, NBA, NHL and other big video providers will jump ship as well if they get cheaper rates from verizon and comcast
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There networks are fine (well at least lets not get into an engineering debate) they increase internal bandwidth as needed. I say this as a customer of them with multiple 10ge ports on a half dozen providers. Comcast etc are not increasing capacity at there peering points or paid transit, they are pretty much saying we have the eyeballs and your going to pay us to reach them. They are intentionally not upgrading to force more netflix type deals while screwing over there customer base by not giving them wh
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the point is that comcast is doing this not to kill netflix, but to kill L3 and Cogent to grab their business.
comcast and verizon want the transit business as well. ISP's used to do hosting until amazon took it away. taking the transit business is a way to get hosting back as well
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yes, long line of businesses out there willing to spend thousands of $$$ per customer to run fiber in places where there already is a network run just to capture at best a 50% ratio of a $50 per month revenue business
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why? there are dozens of streaming services out there that compete with pay TV and the ISP's all give them access to their network and data centers via third party CDN's at reasonable prices
Biased (Score:3, Insightful)
So, just to make it clear up front... Level3 is a Tier1 provider. Basically they are an ISP to the consumer ISPs. This is how your ISP connects to the internet (that's an over simplification but it will serve our purposes here) There are other Tier1 networks that the ISPs can connect to.
The point to these peering agreements is that Netflix and other companies like them make agreements with the ISPs to elevate congestion. So Google (random example) goes to AT&T (another random example) and says "We want to sign a peering agreement with you. We'd like to use Level3 for 2 years." and if AT&T agrees they do the same. So now both companies know there will be 10gig of traffic coming at them for 2 years and they can sign a reciprocal contract with Level3. This is standard
What Netflix does that angers pretty much every ISP on the planet is that they refuse to negotiate on these agreements at all. Instead they show up and say "We're going to use Level3, and we're not going to tell you for how long. Here's a long list of conditions that may cause us to switch without notice" so the ISP is stuck not knowing how long of a contract to sign and end up losing a lot of money when Netflix switches without notice.
The Tier1 providers love this. There's nothing better if you're a network provider than a customer locked into a contract they can't get out of stuck paying for bandwidth they aren't using.
The ISPs in question are likely in negotiation with Level3 on contracts. Level3 has been using the Netflix situation to their advantage. I suspect that this blog post by their VP is just an attempt to push the issue and get them to sign deals more lucrative for level3.
Not saying the ISPs aren't sucking. But this guys words need to be taken with a grain of salt. He's not out trying to help the consumer.
Dead Wrong (Score:4, Informative)
Peering agreements are between two organizations, not between two organizations with a tier-1 between them. Netflix's peering agreement was not through level-1, it was direct between comcast and netflix. Tier-1 providers are the intermediary between non-peering entities, and tier-1 providers peer with those entities.
Re:Dead Wrong (Score:5, Informative)
Exactly. @Charliemopps, that is not how the internet works.
As AC tries to explain:
Netflix _pays_ Level3 for internet access (Level3 is a tier1 so has connectivity to the whole internet). _Pays_ being the important word here
You _pay_ your ISP for internet, and they _pay_ a tier1 for access. From the money you pay. No reason to ask Netflix for money.
The actual situation is more difficult because ISPs and content providers also peer. That is, they connect to each other, and pay each other nothing for the privilege. This makes sense because both parties pay less to their tier1 or transit provider.
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Three Weeks in ISP Hell (Score:5, Insightful)
I just spent three weeks in the U.S.
The internet service was like being in a third-world country, but no one would believe it if you told them.
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You are correct. Our internet here is an utter joke from end to end.
Details please (Score:3)
Because I get real tired of hearing stuff like this completely context free.
Where were you? What kind of net connection did you have? Where are you from? What kind of net connection do you have there? What kind of latency do you see? What kind of download speeds do you get from large download providers? What is your packet loss like? Etc, etc.
Reason I say that is because I live in the US and if my Internet is "like being in a third-world country" then we've reached the point where the third-world is connect
Re:Details please (Score:4, Informative)
Her are those details:
I live in Japan and not in the middle of a city. I'm in a suburban area and have lived in what would be considered almost rural at one time.
I've had fiber for over 13 years. The only time I've ever had a service interruption was during the major earthquake 3 years ago. Internet came back up within an hour, though. That was the only time I've had a power outage too, in over 22 years of living in Japan.
I was in several major cities the southeast U.S. - Orlando, Atlanta, Nashville, etc. I needed to ftp data to my servers and it was almost impossible. So slow that I had to give up and wait until I returned home. I was at a friend's house and he lost internet service at least once per week. He had to scream answers for 5 minutes through his phone to a silly automated service before he could talk to a person. He said he has to do it weekly...
I couldn't get any emails from Asia through his connection. They're all blocked, and those were from the major ISP's in Japan - NTT and Softbank. Blocked! Every foreign web server was like pulling teeth.
Public WiFi was, well, pathetic.
It has nothing to do with size of the country. I had faster, more reliable service in the middle of nowhere surrounded by rice paddies in Japan 10 years ago than exists in U.S. urban areas now.
The reason is that there is competition in Japan. No area franchises. It's a free country.
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all you have to do is get off wifi and get your modem switched out to a DOCISS 3 modem
i'm in a city and being on wifi is a path to shitty internet with 20 people around me streaming netflix at the same time. went to ethernet and everything works with no more disconnects
L3, Cogent and Others Crying Wolf (Score:3)
Peering agreements are established between different networks to further the common interests of both network providers.
For example - Cogent and Verizon reach a peering agreement of 100 megabit. This is a dedicated symmetrical connection between the two companies. They do this because in theory it is cheaper to swap data directly rather then pay a 3rd party to transmit the data between the two networks.
Now what happens when Cogent goes and sells a bunch of cheap bandwidth to various providers like Netflix and begins flooding relatively one way traffic onto Verizon's network? Well they saturated the 100 megabit connection in one direction. Verizon who isn't anywhere close to the saturation point on their side says hey if you want more bandwidth you have to pay for it because we're not using anywhere near what you are and these agreements are supposed to be fairly equal with respect to traffic flows.
Level 3 and Cogent are both guilty of selling cheap bandwidth to internet companies who mostly only send traffic one way. Video, Music, etc... You can't expect the other side of the peer to just keep expanding the circuit to accommodate your horrible business model.
I'm not a huge fan of any of these companies Verizon, Comcast, Level 3 or Cogent but Level 3 and Cogent are both in the wrong given their current agreements and since they can't reach a deal in private they are parading this out in public and trying to make a spectacle.
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However, Comcast is overwhelmingly an 'eyeball' network - its customers PAY to get access to this music/video. By refusing to setup additional peering interconnects Comcast hurts its own customers. If there was some real competition then they'll be under pressure to optimize their infrastructure and reach an agreement with transit providers on fair and equitable gr
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In competitive markets there isn't a problem (Score:2)
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shill harder bro
Re:L3, Cogent and Others Crying Wolf (Score:5, Insightful)
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However, Comcast is overwhelmingly an 'eyeball' network
It's worth noting, however, that Comcast (and others) try to make sure they're "eyeball" networks. For many years, ISPs have been offering things like "20 mbps downloads, 1 mbps upload." You make it sound a little too much like, "Poor Comcast. They only get the 'eyeball' business, while Cogent and Level 3 go around courting customers looking for mass distribution!" Really, these ISPs have been trying to turn the Internet into more of a broadcast model for years, specifically in the hopes of capitalizing
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Now that streaming video is becoming a common place thing the percentage has swung back up and we are probably 95% down, 5% up on the ISP network. They're all upgrading their last mile connections so you can have 50Mbit+ to the home, but if you
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and now verizon and comcast are going to take a lot of Level 3's business along with Cogent's because they refused to upgrade their part of the network and ran to the blogs
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while true, L3 and Cogent both knew the maximum bandwidth of their settlement free peering connections and still took on the netflix business. against their existing contacts. if they didn't have the ability to deliver the traffic they should have bought the special ports on the ISP's side like they were supposed to
back in the day they would make you pay up if you sent too much traffic to them against the settlement agreement
Much as I suspected (Score:2)
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MOST ISP's are running on gear that is over 12 years old or older. they refuse to upgrade it even by extreme 10 year standards.
Nationalize the Internet in America (Score:4, Interesting)
First, let me be clear -- I'm not a big fan of this idea, but after looking at the problem from multiple angles this idea keeps coming up as the best way to spur competition and end the debate on network neutrality.
A few steps to stop this greed from happening, hopefully:
a) A clear, concise Bill of Internet Rights.
-- This must be done in order to alleviate a lot of the crap going on now. There should be terms that explicitly disallow government agencies from piping internet traffic through their data centers for "analysis" of anything WITHOUT A NON-SECRET COURT ORDER. If it can't stand up the light of day, it doesn't fit with principles this country was founded upon and which hundreds of thousands of men and women have died to uphold. Stop being assholes and running roughshod over the Constitution.
-- This must be done to guarantee privacy. As much as can be, anyway.
-- This must be done to guarantee that all data is treated equally with the obvious need for quality assurance. No more congesting nodes, no more content owner also owns the delivery network so it can shutout competition, no more "you pay us, again, for the bandwidth that our customer who requested your info has already paid for."
b) Nationalize the Distribution Lines
-- All copper, fiber, interconnects, and so on are nationalized.
-- A plan is put into place to guarantee (almost) everyone in the United States good data speeds (10mb/s up and down - minimum) by adding more and more fiber. I say (almost) because there are some VERY remote places where people live and it will take time (plus more money) to reach them. If 90% of the population can be served, including rural areas, then that would be great.
-- Everyone who wishes to be an ISP pays THE SAME per connection. Yes, that would mean someone in Small Town, Iowa costs the same as someone in New York to connect to the internet. The overhead of the ISP will determine what $XX.xx is added to the government mandated $YY.yy and here's the rub - customer service comes back to the forefront and actually means something because the Public will know what the $YY.yy is. Competition to gain and keep customers based on price alone should vanish as value-added services and real customer service return to the industry.
-- We have a glut of workers needing work. Teach them to lay fiber optic cable and copper if needed. Put them to work moving the United States back to the top of the chart in broadband/internet access. In this day and age it is a necessity, not a luxury. Easily as ubiquitous today as the telephone and mail were in their days.
I'm probably missing a massive hole in my theory (greed being at the top of that list), but if this was done it would foster intense competition and new ideas as one would not be held back by thinking "I will get blocked out by Company A because they have a grip on distribution of a similar idea." Freedom from the so-called content creators of today locking down sections of the internet or using their power to double and triple-dip the pockets of consumers and competitors.
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Keep Pressing The Public Comment Channels (Score:5, Informative)
Yesterday, the net neutrality petition [whitehouse.gov] passed the halfway mark, with 18 days left to go. The FCC request for comments [fcc.gov] is still live and looking for your feedback, and Mozilla has an alternative in the offing [mozilla.org].
Keep the pressure on, keep posting these things on your social networks, keep telling your friends. The only thing less effective than telling the government what we want is not telling them what we want. It is a double edged sword; either they do as we say, or we get one more bit of documentation to support reforming the government.
Would you like to know more? (Score:2)
My take is that the overselling of all-you-can-eat broadband will need to come to an end as Comcast (any ISP that employs the practice) simply cannot sustain an uncongested and reliable network as long as they rely on it. An unpopular idea but one that needs to be considere
VERY slow page load... (Score:2)
Perhaps they shouldn't be hosting their blog server on one of those 6 ISPs.
The real solution... (Score:2)
The real solution is that:
1. More content needs to be accessible via peer-to-peer.
2. ISPs need to have content proxies and encourage their users to use them.
3. Don't use "transparent proxies" because they're frequently worse than useless.
4. Static data shouldn't be served via HTTPS but instead by some kind of GPG content encoding via HTTP so that it may be cached.
Just my 2.
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Sounds like its an ad targeted just at you. There isn't anyone else here gets their jollies from that sort of thing.
Besides..who see's ads on this site anyways?
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Doesn't appeal to me. I only get off on Ewok porn.
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This is why Chewbacca lives on Endor.
Re:USA=Third World Internet (Score:4, Interesting)
>providers are FORBIDDEN to upgrade any portion of their networks to IPv6 without NSA direct approval.
Source? The signal you're picking up through your tinfoil hat doesn't count.
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I've had IPv6 provided by Comcast (yea Comcast) for about a year now. Maybe you should find a different ISP.
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2) IPv6. Should be upgraded already. Really. My own house network, my lab all of it runs IPv6. Throughput gains on IPv6 vs IPv4 is impressive.
Really, like 20% performance upgrade running the exact same protocols on a IPv6 stack.
Either your full of shit or theres some traffic control going on the ipv4 network that isn't on the ipv6 network packets.
IPv6 by design will always be slower over the same wire, it has more packet overhead
the rest of your post is just you talking out your ass about things you don't understand
No you don't (Score:2)
Either you don't do what you say you do, or your AFDB is too tight and it is causing you to hallucinate.