Two Major ISPs Are Suffering Outages, Making the Internet Really Slow Right Now (slate.com) 131
Freshly Exhumed writes: Two major backbone internet service providers -- Level 3 and Cogent -- appear to be suffering from massive outages and downgraded service, according to ISP monitoring service Downdetector. Users in San Francisco, Los Angeles, Chicago, Boston, Dallas, Atlanta, New York, Philadelphia, Baltimore, and Washington, D.C. are apparently being hit the hardest. Comcast is also said to be affected to a lesser degree. "Backbone internet service providers work directly with large internet platforms like Netflix to deliver large amounts of data across networks, and also work behind the scenes of consumer-facing ISPs," reports Slate. "Since the internet is an interconnected mess of wires, disruptions with Level 3 and Cogent could impact service for Comcast and Verizon users in turn."
This is why we need net neutrality! (Score:4, Funny)
Damn it! This is exactly why we need net neutrality. Here we are now living in a world without net neutrality, and this happens so soon. Damn it, people, we need net neutrality!
Re:This is why we need net neutrality! (Score:4, Interesting)
Damn it! This is exactly why we need net neutrality. Here we are now living in a world without net neutrality, and this happens so soon. Damn it, people, we need net neutrality!
No, both reasons are why we need mesh nets. Moreover, lack of net neutrality will bring about mesh nets, the death of Silicon Valley marketing mega corps (e.g. Silicon Valley corporations,) the end of monopolistic control over the content people share online, etc. The death of net neutrality will be the greatest thing to happen on the internet since before the start of The Eternal Summer, by ending The Eternal Summer.
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This. A million times, this. Iâ(TM)ve believed for a long time that mesh nets are the only way forward. Messy, and maybe a little scary, a lot harder for corporations to control, but theyâ(TM)ll be robust and effective.
Okay, but these mesh networks still need access to the internet at large. I am sure users will want to be able to do something useful. A mesh network is nothing more than an interesting curiosity if it cannot reach the internet.
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They'll still have access to the internet but it will be through commercial links. The mesh network is about providing options at the last mile. Even if you only get a trickle at 100kbps that's 1gB of content a day. Then once you add store and forward support on portable devices and local p2p on the mesh.
For the poor or basic user: This extra capacity would be enough for some users to drop their internet package and do their regular web browsing over their cellular connection. Pretty sure that the major
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They'll still have access to the internet but it will be through commercial links. The mesh network is about providing options at the last mile.
That's an application of it but that's not what it's about. It's about replacing ISPs, centralized websites, the ability to spy passively across large swaths of the population, cheaper network costs, faster speeds, etc. They tend to be wireless, they also tend to have 1gbps up/down speeds. When you're talking about connecting your entire town at the rate of a LAN you are necessarily talking about a distributed P2P network over which you can share videos, host your own local sites, etc. Combine that with
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I like you! Still, unless you know something that I don't. Setting up usable mesh networks is hard and there'll be challenges. I don't think it's anything that would keep them from popping up in downtown tech hubs quickly and then people will work on lowering the barrier to entry. Then it will move to the general nerd population until finally it's included in off the shelf soho products.
By that time there will be a bunch of sweet protocols. Like you said there will be a ton of cheap to run community
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No, both reasons are why we need mesh nets. Moreover, lack of net neutrality will bring about mesh nets, the death of Silicon Valley marketing mega corps (e.g. Silicon Valley corporations,) the end of monopolistic control over the content people share online, etc. The death of net neutrality will be the greatest thing to happen on the internet since before the start of The Eternal Summer, by ending The Eternal Summer.
So by your arguments, the death of net neutrality will spur community-based wireless mesh networks? Okay, I will buy that. However, at some point the users of the mesh network will want to get access to Facebook and Twitter. Thus, there has to be access to the internet at large.
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More likely that Cogent was playing games trying to hot-potato route onto the Level(3) network and Level(3) once again decided to shut them down route onto
This happened in 2005, and Cogent still continues to think this dick move is a great idea
http://www.lightreading.com/cable-video/ott/cogent-gearing-for-another-peering-battle/d/d-id/707831
Re: This is why we need net neutrality! (Score:4, Insightful)
Exactly but not quite.
Comcast's customers pay Comcast to access internet. In part, some Comcast's customers are particularly interested to access Netflix. Comcast's top order of business as an ISP should be to deliver the traffic requested (Netflix or otherwise), and already paid for, by their customers in the fastest way possible. Whether Comcast would buy bandwidth from a Tier 1 network that will transit Netflix traffic to them, build private peering with Netflix and pay for the dark fiber themselves (from their customer's subscription fees) and even provide Netflix with hardware (e.g. SFPs switches and routers that will be in the Netflix data center) or host Netflix server locally in the Comcast's data centers, free of charge to Netflix, thus effectively paying Netlifx in covering the tab for power, rackspace and cooling from the subscription fees of Comcast's customers, an ISP (Comcast) has the obligation to deliver the traffic its subscribers have already paid for. Otherwise, in a free market customers will switch to an ISP that have properly assured that the traffic their customers request is delivered with the proper quality.
Sadly, US is not a free market. It' funny the best internet service these days can be found in Eastern Europe.
Netflix on their end collect subscription fees from the ISPs customers. Netflix should use these fees to cover their server and content cost and make every effort possible to deliver the traffic originating in their servers to the nearest peering/border point in the direction of the customer who has asked for it. The ISP on the other end of said peering should make every possible effort to deliver that traffic to the subscriber who requested it and paid for, by maintaining the necessary peering/upsteam connections and paying the associated fees for those (e.g. dark fiber, routers, switches, datacenter interconnects, etc).
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Care to clarify. I don't think this makes sense. (Score:2)
Netflix content comes down a CDN so each of it's edge nodes has a different ISP. Would you care to clarify your statement. I've had a few beers so maybe I'm missing something.
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NetFlix continually shopped around for the cheapest ISP and then had streaming issues which it pretender were not the result of going with the cheapest ISP. When Cogent was dumping more data on Level 3 due to NetFlix than vise-versa, a peering dispute ensued because Cogent no longer qualified for settlement free peering. Level 3 refused to upgrade the interlinks and occasionally shut them off entirely. Then NetFlix moved over to Level 3 and the sh
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Thats today. Thats not 10 years ago. Thats not 5 years ago.
No 5 years ago netflix was moving from AWS and akamai to their own hosting and CDN. Since this doesn't make sense I decided to look for myself and it's now obvious that they're just a bunch of bloodsucking mba cocksuckers pointing the finger at each other. The whining between these providers is bullshit each and every one of them is a new set of excuses every year.
They simply want a check without providing service. Anyhow it turns out netflix went cdn'less for a short period of time. Fucking stupid id
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Still works, no? Or how were you able to post this?
Not Outages, it's neutrality freedom blackouts (Score:5, Interesting)
It is not outages, it is neutrality freedom blackouts to ensure quality service. They need to add the Freedom package for full access.
Backbone Internet providers (Score:2)
I want to thank Beau for including the explanation of backbone providers for all of us who would have been scratching our heads about how a tier 1 outage could possibly be affecting us personally.
Re:Backbone Internet providers (Score:4, Insightful)
I think it's good that such information was included. While the readership of the early-2000s era Slashdot probably knows what a backbone provider is, there's a good portion of the late-2017 Slashdot readership that probably is not aware.
Thanks to the rise of the cloud, as well as a decrease in the running of personal/independent web sites thanks to consolidation around platforms like Facebook and Twitter, many computer professionals today don't know much about network architecture, or even what in the past we would have considered to be the most basic elements of computer networking.
While 15 years ago it was routine for us to set up our own routers, even to the point of stringing and crimping our own cables, there's a whole generation of professionals who doesn't have that experience. All they've ever known is wireless networking. Cloud platforms like AWS completely insulate them from anything more complex than whitelisting a TCP or UDP port.
A good example of this lack of understanding with regards to networking is visible in much of the net neutrality discussion here. There are unfortunately too many people who don't understand the 7 layer OSI model [wikipedia.org] of networking. They say that net neutrality is important for levels 1 to 3, but then don't think that it should apply to levels 4 through 7.
These people with limited knowledge of networking think it's wrong when telecom providers handle IP packets differently based on the content, but they refuse to apply that same standard to higher-level networking concepts like social media comments or social media accounts. They cry foul when telecom providers treat packets differently, but these same people are perfectly fine with anti-neutral actions like comments being hidden/deleted, or worse, users being banned, even when these comments or users are perfectly legal.
Instead of supporting net neutrality, these people with limited understanding of networking actually support net partiality! They only want 43% of the OSI layers to be treated with neutrality, instead of 100% of the layers like true supporters of net neutrality want.
So it's good when the editors here explain basic concepts. There are a lot of people here who have severely limited understanding of even the most basic aspects of computer networking.
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FYI, like any old-hand knows, Cogent has repeatedly abused peering agreements and sought to hot-potato route (slam traffic onto a competitors network as fast as possible without allowing for similar use of their own network) since Level(3) slammed their dick in the cookie jar in 2005 and effectively broke the internet just to get Cogent to cool their jets
It never really stopped Cogent and they have played the same stupid game over and over again
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Indeed, the root problem is the lack of seperation between the natural monopoly (or duopoly if you are lucky) of "last mile" communications and the other parts of the buisness (internet service, TV serivice etc). This is compounded by the fact that some of the US providers are extremely large.
IIRC the US forced telcos to allow ISP competition on traditional exchange-based ADSL lines but never extended that to other types of communications service (FTTC, FTTP, cable etc). So as traditional DSL has become a l
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They are rebooting their routers.. (Score:1)
to enable those new fancy QOS features not that NN is deader than chivalry.
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Ditto
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NN never banned QoS. Banning QoS 'breaks the internet'.
But it put its definition into the hands of a group (uncle Charlie) that supporters of NN claim doesn't understand the internet. What could go wrong?
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Banning QoS 'breaks the internet'.
No, it doesn't. QoS is only "necessary" if there is congestion. If there is congestion, there need to be bandwidth upgrades, because you oversold your bandwidth too much. If you don't do the right thing, then that's going to be immediately apparent without QoS, and QoS can mask your cheapness for a while, but what 'breaks the internet' is not a lack of QoS but you not providing the bandwidth your customers use (and have a right to use!)
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At this point NN supporters have lost their feeble fucking minds. A law that was never implemented is _needed_ and a necessary practice should be banned because 'rights'.
QoS is needed, simple FIFOs at the routers will leave you gaming with terrible pings, even assuming infinite bandwidth. Ask someone to explain the words you don't understand.
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The other AC is absolutely right. The old rules were not perfect, and should have banned all QoS as well. It doesn't even work, except as a means for artificial congestion. The very concept as applied to the Internet is broken, as there is no fair way to classify traffic. Any efforts to prioritize will disadvantage unknown traffic, which includes emerging protocols and otherwise opaque traffic. Not only does the practice harm innovation, it leads to excessive buffering in the network, which is damaging to a
Sounds familiar (Score:5, Insightful)
"Making the Internet Really Slow Right Now "
Nice internet you had here, but if you'd pay us just 10 bucks more, nothing bad would ever happen to it, capisce?
Re:Sounds familiar (Score:4, Interesting)
That was my thought entirely. Given that Level 3 was just acquired by CenturyLink it wouldn't surprise me in the least that this was them turning some new "traffic shaping experience" software on.
Re: Sounds familiar (Score:2)
You don't want anything bad happenning to your mother's Internet, do you?
Yeah, that's right Slate (Score:1)
Slate sez: "Since the internet is an interconnected mess of wires,"
Next article on their website: Some dumass Trump supporter said the Internet has tubes! OMG don't we feel smug and superior!
oh, bs (Score:3)
Since the internet is an interconnected mess of wires
Bullshit. It's a series of tubes.
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These tubes appear to be blocked with bullshit at the moment. Most likely originating from the FCC......
(lol)
Which is the truth? (Score:1)
A) They were testing their "fast-access pay-only web filter" for rich people, and something went wrong; or
B) They purposely created this problem to later say: "The lines were so over-used that made everything fall, that's a problem of Net Neutrality; if we could adapt the bandwidth this would have not happened".
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The one link between the elite east and west coast monopolies needs an upgrade?
Recall https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Under Net Neutrality this would never happen (Score:1)
Welcome to the new world of Comcast and Verizon being really really really really really slow.
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I am as pro net neutrality as one could be, but this has nothing to do with net neutrality. Two Tier 1 providers decided to no longer have a peering agreement. Well, one of them decided they want something and the other didn't budge, so their interconnections have been shut down. That's like you switching from cable to DSL: You would expect to have a longer (and possibly congested) path to reach other cable customers. Traffic between Level3 customers and Cogent customers now takes a longer route, and since
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Net neutrality does not require anyone to have a business relationship with anyone else. In fact, net neutrality is about the exact opposite: that nobody can extort a business relationship out of you. This is just one ISP deciding that the peering agreement it had with another ISP is no longer favorable, so they ended or suspended it. The traffic between customers of the two now takes longer and congested routes. Nobody is getting throttled and nobody is given fast lane access.
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No. Net Neutrality is about how you route and drop IP packets, and more specifically, not doing it based on source or destination.
Further, the FCC specifically declined to apply their rules to interconnects. From page 10 of the 2015 Open Internet Order [fcc.gov]:
30. But this Order does not apply the open Internet rules to interconnection. Three factors
are critical in informing this approach to interconnection. First, the nature of Internet traffic, driven by
massive consumption of video, has challenged traditional arrangements—placing more emphasis on the
use of CDNs or even direct connections between content providers (like Netflix or Google) and last-mile
broadband providers. Second, it is clear that consumers have been subject to degradation resulting from
commercial disagreements, perhaps most notably in a series of disputes between Netflix and large last
mile broadband providers. But, third, the causes of past disruption and—just as importantly—the
potential for future degradation through interconnection disputes—are reflected in very different
narratives in the record.
Some 90 pages into the 2015 Order it explained how the 2014 Netflix-Level 3-Verizon dispute was not a violation.
Nothing to see, move along (Score:2, Insightful)
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You do know that Trolls guard bridges..
And it appears that given the length of your reply, I'm a master, AC
U mad Bro?
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In Australia , you choose your speed of your connection. 1000mbit links should cost more than 5mbs links dumbass.
Not if it is a 1000mbit by 200s link.
Unbalance Peering (Score:5, Insightful)
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Even with NN, if there's a large imbalance in peering data then some money should change hands. It's up to the peering contract the parties agreed to.
Re:Unbalance Peering (Score:5, Insightful)
Definitely! Verizon should really be paying for their indiscriminate downloading!
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When Net Neutrality was in place, Verizon was forced to allow traffic.
No, that is not true. Nobody was forced to peer with anyone else. That was a bit of loophole in the net neutrality rules: You could just stall *everyone* by not buying enough transit, for example, or by not upgrading a peering with another Tier 1 provider, and then just tell people they should buy network access from you if they want to reach your customers without congestion. That is not and was not a net neutrality violation, just congestion. With net neutrality you couldn't selectively throttle someone's
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Any clueful Internet provider would know not to have Cogent as a single (or even one of two) upstream, and how to route around them when they get in their pissing matches. Cogent will beat anybody's price on bandwidth, because what they lose on each contract, they'll make up in quantity!
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This is not what Net Neutrality means. Net Neutrality means that ISPs may not discriminate based on the origin/destination/contents of a packet. It does not mean that ISPs have to treat 1000GB the same as 1GB.
A byte is a byte is a byte, and Verizon ought to have the right to demand more money to transfer more bytes, so long as they do so in a neutral fashion. Cogent should pay the same rate to transfer a byte from Netflix as one from Hulu or iTunes or Amazon Streaming. That's neutrality over content.
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Cogent should pay the same rate to transfer a byte from Netflix as one from Hulu or iTunes or Amazon Streaming.
NO! Cogent should pay the same rate to transfer a byte from Netflix as one from "some random browser sending a SYN" .... THAT is Net Neutrality.
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Except Verizon were already paid to deliver the traffic by their subscribers. They have no right to double dip. In fact they have obligations to their customers to deliver the traffic requested so Verizon should bear the cost of upgrade of the peering connection, or have peering for the balanced part + subscribe to Cogent for the overage and pay Cogent from the fees already collected from Verizon's subscribers.
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How does that fit in with the fact that the FCC change doesn't actually take effect for another couple of months?
Hmm.... unlikely that stuff now is being impacted by something which hasn't even happened yet, or did you get that arrow of time backward again in your causality equation?
The Internet is... (Score:2)
"Since the internet is an interconnected mess of wires,
So now I'm confused. Did the dump truck overturn, or is a tube clogged up?
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been on generator power for about 31 hours now (since early Saturday morning). About 900 PG&E customers are affected. The latest from PG&E is that they’re still “investigating”.
My own extensive “investigation” concludes the following: no missile from N. Korea, no Coronal Mass Ejection, no Sun Spots (boo, hoo!), no earthquake, no mud slide, no strong winds, no snow/ice.
So why? Who knows? Maybe vandalism. Maybe something failed.. Maybe someone screwed up.
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Couple weeks ago (Score:2)
Situation normal (Score:4, Funny)
"Comcast is also said to be affected to a lesser degree."
So, 33.6k instead of the usual 56k then.
..and of course... (Score:2)
shame on me for thinking that ISPs suddenly struggling to maintain service and net neutrality now going to a senate vote is anything but a complete coincidence.
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There's ISPs and ISPs. The ones we all love to hate are the "local loop" or retail ISPs providing service to the mass of residences and small businesses out there - usually one of a handful of big companies like Comcast, TWC, Cox, AT&T, or Verizon for broadband, or a big cellular provider for phone. There are a bunch of smaller local ISPs, many with quite good service and policies, but they aren't available to most of us.
Then there are the "wholesale" ISPs like Level 3 and Cogent, that provide the "long
No wonder (Score:1)
All this time I thought it was the