Level 3 Wants To Make Peering a Net Neutrality Issue 182
New submitter thule writes "A story at Gigaom talks about how Level 3 is trying to pull peering into the net neutrality issue. Regulating peering could hamper how the Internet is interconnected, potentially turning it into a bureaucratic mess. Should peering be regulated?"
Reader raque points out that Netflix CEO Reed Hastings is banging the net neutrality drum, too:
"Some major ISPs, like Cablevision, already practice strong net neutrality and for their broadband subscribers, the quality of Netflix and other streaming services is outstanding. But on other big ISPs, due to a lack of sufficient interconnectivity, Netflix performance has been constrained, subjecting consumers who pay a lot of money for high-speed Internet to high buffering rates, long wait times and poor video quality. ... Once Netflix agrees to pay the ISP interconnection fees, however, sufficient capacity is made available and high quality service for consumers is restored. If this kind of leverage is effective against Netflix, which is pretty large, imagine the plight of smaller services today and in the future. Roughly the same arbitrary tax is demanded from the intermediaries such as Cogent and Level 3, who supply millions of websites with connectivity, leading to a poor consumer experience."
Users who pay for high bandwidth connections shoul (Score:3, Funny)
Re: Users who pay for high bandwidth connections s (Score:1)
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And if we had more than 2 choices, we would. Right now, it's a duopoly and neither incumbent is willing to rock the boat.
What really needs to be done is to separate the providers from the last mile connection. A lot of ISPs could get in to the game if they only had to get their fiber to a local substation.
Sure, but.. (Score:3)
Re:Sure, but.. (Score:4, Insightful)
Who's going to pay for it? The people who pay for internet... maybe? What else should they be doing with $75/month that people pay for internet?
Re:Sure, but.. (Score:4, Interesting)
I understand you probably don't work with this type/scale of equipment/network on a regular basis, but the fact is $10k *is* extremely cheap. It's also probably a bit of a bogus number, or at least incorporates a whole lot of stuff beyond the actual connection (not just the cost of the optics, but some of the cost of the blade/chassis, and cost of power and rack space over an X year period, etc). The optics themselves are pretty cheap now - probably no more than $800/side, and with the scale of the large operators it's a good bet they're paying $500/ea for 10g SFPs. Believe me, a network operator of this size sneezes 10g optics without thinking about it - their on-site guys probably play dominoes with the spares.
A little fun math: Let's say for the sake of easy math that the average customer pays $42/month for broadband, or $500/year. Let's say the average lifecycle of a 10g optical link and the associated routers is 3 years, and the single cross-connect costs $10k, spread across those 3 years, for a cost of approximately $3500/yr. So, ignoring the cost of the last-mile infrastructure (partly because the vast majority is in place and has probably been paid off for years), the cable company would have to add 7 customers to pay for each new cross-connect. Again using nice round decimal numbers for the sake of easy math, at a cap of 50mbps per subscriber, you could have 200 customers fully saturating their links before you would saturate the 10gbps cross-connect, assuming ALL customer traffic was being routed that way. So if your first 7 customers paid for the cross-connect, and we're talking about 3-year equipment lifecycles, that leaves just shy of $290k for the ISP to spend on their other infrastructure and overhead.
Summary: I think they'll be just fine, and not need to raise your fees (they probably will raise them anyway, but that's an entirely different discussion).
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Dang, I wish I could get $42/month internet. Comcast raised mine to $68/month.
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Right, that was mostly to make a nice even $500/yr, I think mine is actually closer to $75. And of course, a lot of the entry level plans are quite a bit cheaper, and there's all the discounting and such that happens, and a fair portion of bills is taxes and fees.
But, using $42/month as a starting number gives a very generous cushion for the numbers - given what's actually charged to most customers, the $10k for a peering link seems even more insignificant.
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It's all the same thing (Score:3)
They have been playing the oh were not throttling were just over saturated to this peer we don't like for awhile. Sure it's not as targeted as they would like but it gets them there.
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The way traffic is currently handled is ridiculous. As it stands a Verizon subscriber makes a request to Netflix to send data. Netflix then pays Cogent to send the data who then pays Verizon to receive the data that Verizon requested in the first place! That's like me charging the post office to deliver a package I ordered from Amazon.
UPS Mail Innovations (Score:3)
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Except you left out the crucial detail in your analogy: The buyer is ALSO paying the post office for the same step in the process.
Federally funded roads (Score:2)
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Let me take a shot at incorporating this detail: The buyer is paying the post office's parent company for construction and maintenance of post roads [wikipedia.org].
Come on. Are you even trying to make a coherent argument?
In the case of the Internet, paying for the "construction and maintenance" of infrastructure is the same thing as paying to have the bits go back and forth across the networks that make up the Internet.
Or are you seriously saying telecomms are charging to "move" ones and zeroes separately from the infrastructure and energy through which those ones and zeroes "move"?
Having built the infrastructure (Score:2)
Or are you seriously saying telecomms are charging to "move" ones and zeroes separately from the infrastructure and energy through which those ones and zeroes "move"?
Some of what telecoms charge goes toward having built the infrastructure, in the sense that telecoms finance building this infrastructure with debt in the hopes of repaying the debt with subscriber revenue. Some pays for repair to this infrastructure when a backhoe goes in the wrong place or (in my case) a squirrel chews up a subscriber's outside line. And some pays for administration of the infrastructure, such as managing policies on the core routers. Finally, some goes to the investors that assume the ri
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I think you're ignoring the obvious. Or maybe you're actually saying something of value and I can't parse. Maybe you're trolling.
So, telecoms charge to build and run infrastructure that transports packet traffic.
Internal distinctions a company makes about where to invest revenue and resources to build and run that infrastructure do not change the fact that building and maintaining that infrastructure is the same phenomenological process that moves data across the Internet's networks.
All the bureaucratic det
Pricing reflects costs (Score:2)
A business doesn't want to lose a lot of money. This means it doesn't want to be forced into investments in its infrastructure that cause it to lose a lot of money. This means it doesn't want to offer products or services that would force it into money-losing investments. This ends up causing the pricing structure for the services to at least vaguely reflect the cost of providing each service. (It's not perfect, given some of the tying practices to which monopolies have access, but it's still a tendency.)
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Two Words (Score:4, Insightful)
Let's call a duck a duck, shall we? All this "Netflix throttling" and other shady dealings of the ISPs controlling what content customers can view, reasonably, on the connections those customers are paying for, is nothing more than service theft.
Maybe we can put this whole net neutrality debate to bed with one good class action lawsuit, on behalf of all customers of ISPs who commit this type of service theft.
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A class action lawsuit will get you a t-shirt, ball cap, and a bag of peanuts (airline size, which holds about three peanuts). The proper solution is to turn the pipes into public infrastructure, like water, lights, and sewage, and allow service managers, not providers to sell time share.
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A class action lawsuit will get you a t-shirt, ball cap, and a bag of peanuts (airline size, which holds about three peanuts).
It might also get a legal ruling setting the precedent that throttling certain services that your customers pay for is service theft, and get the ISPs who fail to comply with the ruling fined in a huge way.
Which is the part I care about - nobody with a lick of sense joins a class action lawsuit for money. Well, anyone who's not a lawyer.
The proper solution is to turn the pipes into public infrastructure, like water, lights, and sewage, and allow service managers, not providers to sell time share.
Which probably won't happen until somebody (or rather, a large collective of somebodies) sues the holy living shit out of the service "providers."
Because we sure as hell can
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Because we sure as hell can't trust our "representatives" to do their jobs, that's for sure.
So why does everybody keep voting for them? The whole system is being driven by some kind of mass psychosis.
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Because otherwise the wrong lizard might get elected.
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Because we sure as hell can't trust our "representatives" to do their jobs, that's for sure.
So why does everybody keep voting for them?
Because the system is gamed so that only members of a certain, elite ruling class can afford to campaign, thereby assuring that no matter who you vote for, they all have the same interests at heart.
For example, my district recently threw out an incumbent in favor of a "fed up" Tea Party candidate in the last election; however, the only thing that changed was the name on the placard. Ol' Tea-Billy wasn't even in DC for 24 hours before sidling up to the lobbyists feeding trough, just like his predecessor.
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TL:DR - you're preachin' to the choir, bud, now go convert some heathens.
Then you should look for people who don't spend money on campaigns, and vote for them.
I do. Well, I don't vote for them because they didn't spend any money, but it seems to work out that way - the guys I try to elect are usually as broke as me.
But that doesn't change the fact that the system is gamed so that only the wealthy elite stand a snowball's chance of actually winning an election.
Because, you know - they can afford to advertise, and most people base their vote on political ads.
Who I vote for has no bearing on wh
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A class action lawsuit will get you a t-shirt, ball cap, and a bag of peanuts (airline size, which holds about three peanuts). The proper solution is to turn the pipes into public infrastructure, like water, lights, and sewage, and allow service managers, not providers to sell time share.
No, a class action lawsuit gets you coupons for 20% off your next purchase at the corporation you sued. And since you were suing a corporation, you were probably not going to patronize it; so they win.
Well, the lawyers get paid in cash, so they are the actual winners.
WHAT. THE. FUCK? Slashdot Beta... (Score:2)
If you can't control the spam like the original and former Slashdot could, then do the right thing and drop this crap (that NOBODY who visits this site wants).
Seriously, give us what we ASK for and not what you THINK we need. Don't think. We'll do that for you.
If you can't get it right, I for one will go somewhere else for my news and .. unfortunately not discussions, because no really good discussion site exists.
Advice: Two choices here, IMHO.... (Score:1)
You can do what I just did:
1.) go to pref's, and assign a '-5' modifier to your foes, then mark those spam-post authors as 'foe' and reload page.
Or:
2.) join in the discussions at SoylentNews [soylentnews.org]. /. lately. The discussions are more like /. was before Dice took over, and it started as a direct result of /.Beta.
I have been spending more time there than on
The the SN community is still small(but growing), and the SN team has been extremely responsive to community feedback, unlike here.
As a side effect(of the abov
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Sorry to double-reply, but SoylentNews underwent an announced shutdown for maintainance last night, and apparently something went arwy, the site is currently down as of a few seconds ago....
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Honestly, I'm starting to think I should check out MyCleanPC. If SO MANY anonymous posters recomend it, it must be something special!
Peering and Bandwidth Symmetry (Score:4, Insightful)
Since the beginning of peering, the rules have always been that if you have roughly the same amount of traffic inbound and outbound, peering has no charge. If one direction generates more traffic than the other, the source pays for the asymmetry. If you give me 200 GB per minute average, and I give you 100 KB per minute average, you have to pay me for the traffic you are giving to me to deliver to my customers.
Streaming video has this problem - it's all one way. Peering should cost video streaming sources. The RATE charged has to be reasonable, but they don't get free peering.
Re:Peering and Bandwidth Symmetry (Score:5, Insightful)
Since the beginning of peering, the rules have always been that if you have roughly the same amount of traffic inbound and outbound, peering has no charge. If one direction generates more traffic than the other, the source pays for the asymmetry.
This model is outdated, in the good old days networks had a mix of eyeballs and content, now we have completely separate eyeball and content networks. This is mostly the result of the cable/telco monopolies. In the new normal, traffic will never be balanced. I am paying comcast for internet access, it is their responsibility to provide be high quality service. In order to accomplish that they should have an open peering policy and connect at all public exchanges. If the large providers don't get on board with more open peering policies they are going to eventually run into a consumer or small NSP brought anti-trust lawsuit.
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You can't sweep the problem of real cost under a claim that we have lots of asymmetry. If I generate about as much traffic as I get from a peer, then our costs to deal with the traffic are roughly equal. If he sends me 10X what I send him, my costs are higher than his. If the costs are different, at some point, the price is different.
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Traffic is not sent randomly, if something is sent it's because it was requested. It would make more sense to have the recipient pay instead of the sender, the same way the buyer of goods pay.
It would have a few more advantages:
- no need for ads anymore, every time you view a webpage, the content provider gets paid a little bit.
- no more "piracy", "pirates" would pay by eating their bandwidth.
Now the problem is shady content providers sending useless content to inflate the bill. But that would not be differ
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Traffic is not sent randomly, if something is sent it's because it was requested. It would make more sense to have the recipient pay instead of the sender, the same way the buyer of goods pay.
It would have a few more advantages:
- no need for ads anymore, every time you view a webpage, the content provider gets paid a little bit.
- no more "piracy", "pirates" would pay by eating their bandwidth.
Now the problem is shady content providers sending useless content to inflate the bill. But that would not be different from them bombarding us with ads and creating parking websites.
Small issue here. Bandwidth isn't worth the same as the content that consumes it. Not by a long shot in the most fevered dreams of Comcast executives. In fact, this is what scares them so much. They've been exploiting this asymmetry since the end of the national cable rollout in the 80s. They know that once they've payed off the fixed costs of hardware, the prices they charge do not reflect in any way the ongoing costs of maintenance. Bits are cheap. The pipes they travel over have all already been payed fo
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If you (in the form of paying customers from your network) are requesting data, you don't get to charge the provider of that data for the privilege of sending it to you.
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That does not mean you can not work out effective deals where everyone wins. If I peer with you in several geographic locations, it takes load off your backbone links, lowering your cost (L3 example). If I am a small operator peering in one area, an arrangement could be worked out where my prefixes are only advertised in the region through the use of bgp communities, reducing the other providers backbone costs. This is effectively what should have been done with netflix. L3 taking this issue up is a major g
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If he sends me 10X what I send him, my costs are higher than his.
And that's offset by the millions of customers paying you $50-$100/month that he doesn't see a penny from.
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Since the beginning of peering, the rules have always been that if you have roughly the same amount of traffic inbound and outbound, peering has no charge.
That must have been *very* early on. I remember reading an article in the late 90's that stated that Yahoo! only payed for half of their total bandwidth requirements. Transit was costing them too much money. So they peered with large ISP's to cut their transit costs. They were connecting eyeballs to content. Both sides of the equation won because ISP's would take traffic off of their transit connection and so did Yahoo!. Yes, it does cost money to peer, but for Yahoo! it saved them money. How is this any di
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No different I think. Yahoo would pay for peering if it's bandwidth was asymmetric, but it would probably pay less to peer directly than through a transit network. Before peering, they would pay an ISP for access. After peering, they would pay the peering partner for the asymmetry, but that would be less than what they were paying for transit. If Yahoo users generated more traffic to a peer than they consumed, the peer would pay Yahoo. That probably didn't happen.
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No, I believe the article stated that Yahoo! was getting the bandwidth for "free". That is, Yahoo! is its own national network with POP's in all the big cities. Yahoo! is like an ISP, but unlike an ISP, Yahoo! did not sell transit. The only point of their network was to peer with large ISP's. They would drop in a router and get as many ISP's to connect their POP's to their router for free.
The difference today is that Netflix has a lot more data. A LOT more. Gone are the days of simple web sites. Depending o
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in the old days Yahoo was an ISP and probably had links to a lot of network providers
The issue is... (Score:4, Insightful)
I THE !@#$ COMCAST CUSTOMER AM PAYING FOR THAT DELIVERY
So !@#$ give it to me, or let me have the fun of bashing the Comcast CEO's head repeatedly with a nerf baseball bat.
And yes, I am yelling slashdot, because I'm pissed and sick and tired of it. And my congressmen are dickheads.
Re:The issue is... (Score:5, Insightful)
Yeah, you are paying for it, and they should deliver it to you.
But both ends pay. Netflix, or whomever, pays their ISP, you pay your ISP. Netflix doesn't get a free ride.
When people talk about net neutrality, they worry that Neflix has to pay twice, once to their ISP, and once to your ISP. We don't want that.
But Level(3), one of Netflix's ISPs, may have to pay Comcast if Level(3) sends more traffic to Comcast than Comcast sends to Level(3).
Then again, Comcast better handle that traffic equally well, and better have the capacity to exchange the traffic fairly.
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They're paying twice, but they're paying for two different things. Netflix pays their ISP for the cost of delivering their traffic to Comcast. But they also pay Comcast for half the difference between their ISP's delivery costs and Comcast's delivery cost.
Say I want to send a package to you and we agree to split the cost of delivery. I might pay a courier to take the package to a pickup point and you might pay a courier to take the package from the pickup point to you. But if your courier is more expensive
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You're hitting it pretty close to the mark here. It comes down to the line between good traffic engineering and violating net neutrality is not a clear one. While I think Something Should Be Done(tm), I sometimes worry the cure may be worse than the disease. I work for a CDN and I can kind of see everyone's side simultaneously.
I think the difference here is in this case, it is Comcast's own customers that are requesting the traffic. Calling Comcast a "peer" like LVLT in this situation is a little bit murky,
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And that's "we apologize", not "we're apologize". Derp. Even previewed and didn't catch it until half a second AFTER I pressed "post".
Except for one problem... (Score:2)
I've already paid Comcast to deliver the dirt to me.
What is happening, is that now Comcast is complaining that I want the dirt I've already ordered and purchased.
Long haul vs. last mile (Score:3)
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No, you should pay half the cost of the delivery. The sender should pay the other half. This is why the Internet has, for decades, used settlement-based for asymmetric flows. Otherwise, folks like Netflix and Google won't be paying half the costs.
It is fundamental to Netflix's business model that they will have a small number of sources that produce large amounts of traffic to a large number of destinations. It is common sense that this means that Netflix will, in the absence of settlements, pay less than h
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And to think: I have been paying my ASDL provider, when I should have been charging them.
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I think you don't understand what *peering* is.
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No, peering costs should just be part of the business and spread out to all thew customers as part of the bill. This is probably how it would work, if not for the communications cartels writing the rules and protecting the monopoly.
Re:Peering and Bandwidth Symmetry (Score:4, Insightful)
But that's not how my peering arrangement works with my ISP! I connect my network with theirs and they charge me for all the traffic they send me! Hint: there is really no such thing as peering, only a network-of-networks that makes the Internet. Any other definition is the not the Internet. The only rational model is for the sink to pay for the asymmetry, like the power grid.
Regards,
-Jeremy
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You don't have a peering arrangement with your ISP, you have a transit arrangement with them. These things are *completely* different. You use your ISP to reach other networks. Netflix doesn't want to use Comcast to reach anyone else.
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No they are not. They are just semantic terms for paying or free. You've bought the lie.
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I'll put this in terms that are as simple as possible, since you clearly don't understand the difference between peering and transit. When you want to reach a network in Sweden, your ISP carries that traffic for you. When your ISP wants to reach a network in Sweden, they can't ask you to carry it. That's why you pay your ISP. It has nothing to do with ratios or directions -- it's because your ISP is providing you with transit and you are not providing your ISP transit.
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This is why the physical portion should be owned by the state. Let the wireless, cellular, and last hop be distributed by providers, including last hop pots. Companies rent the physical and sell the service. It serves to maintain the resource without tossing it into one, or the other, downward spiral. For example, it limits the stagnation affect caused when the state controls resources and forces a balance between companies that want to gouge customers and what people believe is reasonable. The only th
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the rules have always been that if you have roughly the same amount of traffic inbound and outbound, peering has no charge.
I'm curious why this was the rule - is it because most network interfaces are inherently bi-directional? Or was it a feeling that information is valuable, so if your network absorbs valuable information from the outside, it should provide an equivalent amount of valuable information back out?
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you have to pay me for the traffic you are giving to me to deliver to my customers
Your customers already paid you. If you don't deliver, they will be happy to pay someone else.
Of course the providers will either legislate themselves into a monopoly or oligarchy and the customers get screwed.
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Peering is for peers. For backbone providers.
Comcast is not a peer. Comcast is an end user. Comcast should pay for both the inbound and outbound traffic onto a backbone.
Nowwww, this gets complicated as hell if Comcast owns or bought a backbone network.
I don't know. Maybe the old model just doesn't work any more, because in the old days "soruces" and "sinks" were spread out, now they're not, they're all segregated, network A is all sinks, network B is all source. And the idea that "source pays" seems ki
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And the idea that "source pays" seems kind of stupid.
It's always seemed kind of stupid to me that you pay your ISP to let some third party send you data, with the ISP paying some upstream transit provider to be on the receiving end, when the postal service and package delivery have always worked the other way around. When you order goods online you pay the retailer for the cost of shipping, and they in turn pay someone to deliver the goods to you. A fixed rate for maintaining a connection to your ISP would be reasonable, much like paying for your own local ro
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Comcast is not an end user, they are a peer. When two networks exchange traffic as peers, that means they exchange only traffic that originates on one of their networks and terminates on the other. This is precisely what Comcast and Netflix want to do -- exchange traffic that originates on one network and terminates on the other. That is, by definition, peering.
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The presumption behind the scheme is that the traffic benefits both sides equally and thus the costs should be split. If Netflix wants to receive traffic that provides no benefit whatsoever to Comcast customers, they should pay 100% of the costs for that traffic. So that won't actually even the flow at all but only make it more asymmetric.
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Of course not. Paying for bandwidth asymmetry is only used where its logic makes sense. The basic underlying assumption is that traffic that begins on one network and terminates on the other benefits both sides equally and thus the costs should be split roughly evenly. Paying for bandwidth asymmetry is an approximation to cover the case where one side pays more than the other, usually because one side has to carry the traffic further than the other. (Generally, you carry inbound traffic further than outboun
Not network neutrality problem, a business problem (Score:3, Insightful)
(Sorry, a properly grammatical title would not fit in the space allotted)
Netflix & Level 3 Only Telling Half The Story, Won’t Detail What Changes They Want To Net Neutrality [streamingmedia.com]
In a fairly deep and interesting article over at StreamingMedia.com, Dan Rayburn argues that there is more to the story here and that neither Netflix nor Level 3 are giving us their proposed solutions. He goes through both the Netflix [netflix.com] and the Level3 [level3.com] blog posts, taking them apart very carefully.
It is not a network neutrality problem, but rather a business problem. Worthwhile read.
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What a bunch of bunk.
"Intermediaries"? Really? (Score:2)
..intermediaries such as Cogent and Level 3
Calling companies like these "intermediaries" is disingenuous at best, they are backbone providers and there wouldn't BE an Internet without them.
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They're intermediaries because from the customer's point of view (customer in this context being residentials and office), they're behind their ISP. The ISPs deal with them, make deals with them, call them when there's an issue, not you or me.
Aren't they supposed to be just pipes? (Score:2)
They don't want to be accountable for what's on their network (dumb pipes), yet they want control over what's flowing in said pipes. Have their cake and eat it too?
Besides, people are paying for connectivity at specified speeds, what they do with it doesn't matter if it's Youtube, Netflix, or anything else...
Why should Netflix pay? what about ABC, CBS, NBC, Youtube, Porntube, and all the others? What about web sites? Facebook?
Go on the offensive (Score:2)
Netflix and Google need to go on the offensive. When Comcast asks for extortion money, shut them off and pay for advertisements for its competitors like Verizon or RCN.
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I have the choice of high speed cable via Time Warner, DSL via ATT, or satellite via Houges net. Lets see here, fast, slow, and slower! There is no real choice for the market to make, as the city makes the choice based on what cable, and phone provider gives them the right bid to lay the lines.
On the peering issue, network owners have a right to charge for a peering connection. However, it would
Re:Fine Line (Score:5, Interesting)
as the city makes the choice based on what cable, and phone provider gives them the right bid to lay the lines.
Franchise fees are not a "bid", they are a contractually negotiated fee for using city rights of way. Once a fee is negotiated, it would be hard for a city to say "your fee will be higher" to a second company, since they've set the price for access.
What prevents a second cable system from overbuilding the first is not the franchise fee, it is the lower return on investment from having to compete with the existing system. No business would want to invest heavily in physical plant when there would be little profit in doing so. Their fixed costs would not be recouped by the sales, much less the incremental costs.
It's not like a grocery store where the fixed costs are relatively low to find and outfit a building and have the customer come to you. Cable requires the "grocery store" to go to the customer where he is, and simply lowering prices until the customers stop going to the competitor and start coming to you won't work. It is not economically viable to build the system as you get customers. The turn-on time would be long.
There is NO MARKET (Score:2)
The only internet provider I have available to me is Comcast. How can I choose to let the market have its affect?
Comcast sold Verizon it's wireless spectrum cheap in exchance for Verizon to stop expanding it's FiOS service. Now both advertise each other's services on their websites.
So let's let market considerations take it's toll. In which case, I as a disgruntled customer should be able to basically drive a bulldozer over Comcast's network nodes as I have zero other recourse.
How's that sound?
Choosing where to live (Score:1)
The only internet provider I have available to me is Comcast.
Available to you, or available where you happen to live at the moment? I know it's not a feasible option for everyone, but some people report having taken Internet access into account when choosing where to live.
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The only internet provider I have available to me is Comcast.
Available to you, or available where you happen to live at the moment? I know it's not a feasible option for everyone, but some people report having taken Internet access into account when choosing where to live.
So your response to a monopoly is to run away and not fight the abuse?
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So your response to a monopoly is to run away
Either that or regulation, and I don't see today's captured state governments and FCC willing to rein in these monopolies. And in the long run, in theory, if people run away from monopoly enablers, monopoly enablers will lose tax revenue. But as I said before, I know it's not a feasible option for everyone.
No (Score:3)
Internet providers should be classified as Utilities.
If they want to get in on content generation/distribution, create another company that pays and plays like all the rest.
Re:Indeed. (Score:5, Informative)
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I certainly hope not! If you don't like it, don't read it.
Aside from the Scientology incident, I would like to know if comments are being removed at all. Censorship is unacceptable.
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And by the way, you can block it by setting your threshold.
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$('*:contains("mycleanpc")').parents('.commentBody').remove();
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The scenario with Netflix and ISP's is exactly what I've been describing for years. That is, use congestion on links to beat net neutrality. I would point this out and people would still focus on filtering and shaping. Who needs to filter when an ISP can just peer with a preferred VoIP provider? The link would have plenty of extra capacity and get very good quality of service. No neutrality rules have been broken because the ISP isn't shaping or filtering. They are using the inherit capability of the Intern
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You seem to be the one that doesn't understand what net neutrality even means. You have a bunch of companies colluding to degrade services for popular sites like Youtube or Netflix unless they pay a popularity fee. Net neutrality says that you have to treat everybody equally. When you draft a law and then realize that companies are still finding ways to not treat everybody equally you close loop-holes. Honestly, what is there to be skeptical about?
If you're in the camp where all regulation is bad then I sta
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But the ISP would be failing to deliver the promised bandwidth. If the ISP would always deliver the bandwidth they had promised to the customer, there wouldn't be an issue. Unfortunately the ISPs will always pull the disclaimer about not guaranteeing, that the server you are accessing has spare capacity. Though this disclaimer makes sense, it isn't necessarily true in all cases, where the ISP would apply it.
If A want to send
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And lack of regulation leads to monopoly abuse.
The Internet, as it is, can't survive. Both governments and corporations have an interest in stamping out a model based on participation and user-generated content. When those same Powers that Be control the physical infrastructure of the Internet itself, the end result is pretty obvious.
The question is, could anything replace it and do so in time? For
Re:The Slippery Slope (Score:5, Insightful)
WTF are you talking about? Level 3 is complaining because they are now being extorted by ISPs who are trying to double-dip and charge them hefty fees for peering agreements. This was not a problem when net neutrality regulations were in place, but after Verizon won their case over net neutrality, it took Comcast only five weeks to go on a rampage and start extorting fees from other providers. So this is exactly what you get when you DON'T have net neutrality and you DON'T have regulation.
It's not great for companies like Level 3 because they are the ones being extorted. The current lack of regulation is great for companies like Comcast who are threatening to throttle connections of their own users if content providers don't pay Comcast an extortion fee. Again, it only took five weeks of the regulations being removed before Comcast started pulling this shit. It may be time for you to admit that moderate and sensible regulation is not a bad thing.
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Level 3 and Cogent try to "peer" with Tier 1 carriers when they are really just middlemen taking tier 1 carrier potential customers and offering them a cheaper deal because they "peer" with tier 1 carriers. They are not peers. They are customers and should pay like anyone else. The top carriers have invested in equipment, fiber, facilities, and personnel to manage a much more robust network than either carrier and should be compensated accordingly.
I work for a tier 1 and I can tell you every time we brin
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Doesn't Comcast want to be able to offer Netflix to its users?
Of course not. They want to offer their overpriced video-on-demand/PPV service without having any pesky competition.
Re:The Slippery Slope (Score:5, Insightful)
I'll freely agree that too much regulation is a problem. But too little is also a problem in a non-free market, and telecom in general is almost as non-free as it gets (bettered only by electric, water, sewer, etc.) Since there's not enough competition to force a given broadband provider to not gouge their customers and partners, we (as a society) either have to use regulation or settle for getting gouged.
I say as a society because an individual does have the option (however unpalatable it is) to simply do without internet; "take it or leave it". But that's becoming less and less of a viable solution as more and more of our day to day interactions with each other, with companies, and with government move to the internet. If improvement only happens after substantial numbers quit and quitting is infeasible, then nothing will ever improve.
Of course, I believe it is possible to have an amount of regulation which is neither too much nor too little, though it's harder to maintain that balance as the bureaucratic empires grow and harden. If you don't feel that such a sweet spot is possible, then I can see how less regulation would be preferable to more. But in that case we need to drop this districted monopoly system too, so we can actually hope for some competitors.
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I'll freely agree that too much regulation is a problem. But too little is also a problem in a non-free market, and telecom in general is almost as non-free as it gets
This is the wrong way to look at it. Instead of thinking of it in terms of "more" or "less," think of it in term of "good regulations" and "bad regulations." Then it's easier to understand situations.
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