11 ms·

Double paid traffic

356 points by revelation 11y ago

viraptor 11y ago
I'm not sure how to interpret this post. Is this basically: "we believe in network neutrality, but here's reality for today: your ISP won't expand capacity, so you can pay us to add special uplink"? It looks like testing the ground for idea of "pay per peering" that becomes a separate line on your invoice. (and I mean for any peering, you rent server and connectivity separately)
- kogepathic 11y ago
  I don't think it's quite as you put it. I think Hetzner is saying more: === We believe in net neutrality, but some of our customers have noticed that users of these telecom companies cannot access their services during peak hours, or the service is quite slow. Since we cannot change market dynamics, we are offering our customers a way to offer their customers faster service during peak periods with this "pay per peering" option. === My understanding (which may be incorrect) is that Hetnzer is telling existing customers that instead of having to install servers within the ISP network, they can instead pay a marginal fee per month to bypass the congested peering links to these providers.
- thateclipseguy 11y ago
  Well, it's not really a case of net neutrality. Packets aren't being given priority. It's just a simple case of: ISPs are at capacity, connection slow, use these servers instead.
- j_jochem 11y ago
  I think this might actually a good idea. Instead of just paying the peering fee quietly, they give customers the choice to vote with their money. Alas, "customers" here are not end users, but companies who provide content on the internet. I really like that paying up to DTAG is not the default and is more bureaucratic. This might already be enough to kill the ISPs' profiteering schemes, similiar to what happened with the Leistungsschutzrecht (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...) in Germany.
  - digikata 11y ago
    I think more visibility is better, and in this case maybe would give tech companies some food for thought re: how they approach net neutrality issues in politics.
- codingminds 11y ago
  It's more like "Your customers/users ISP (in practice DTAG, Deutsche Telekom AG) doesn't participate much in cost-neutral Tier-1 peerings and instead offers an expensive DTAG peering for additional bandwidth". DTAG can do this because they are (one of) the biggest ISP in germany.
- chronial 11y ago
  > Make sure to clearly state that you would like to order the DTAG uplink in the text field of the request and that you agree to pay the additional € 4.20 a month. The add-on will be called "Double Paid Traffic" on your bill. I think the name "double paid traffic" is a very clear statement. They are not trying to sugarcoat this or anything. They just don't want to loose customers over this.
Pyxl101 11y ago
Frequently it seems as though statements by neutrality advocates mention "providers" without naming any. Who are the providers that misbehave, and what are they doing? Can we see a graph of their traffic and a depiction of the misbehavior? (Saturated links, offers to peer and expand the links that are refused, etc.) I'd love it if the evidence were laid out. Unfortunately at the moment, it seems like there's a lot of ambiguous finger-pointing. What do (presumably) Comcast and these other companies say when you communicate with them about peering, and you ask them why they won't? Anyone with insight into these issues care to share the DLS/cable provider perspective? (Is there some kind of reasonable argument there we're not hearing - "Infrastructure costs are rising, you see, and we built the infrastructure we have now with a government subsidy that's no longer available. So when we expand, it's going to cost 10x as much ... " just to make something up. Is there another side to the story, or is it really just supply/demand where the providers exploit their market power? "Our customers are not likely to drop our Internet service for a competitor just because Netflix is slow. In fact, our data show that they start watching cable TV more, which is good for us - we want cable TV to be sticky. So we'll charge a fee since we're nearly a monopoly and the market will sustain it. Further, since Netflix is where all the traffic is going, we'll just charge them directly rather than expand pipes all around".) [edits] > For this reason, interfaces are being operated at their highest capacity -- to make paid access to the DSL and cable providers' networks attractive for content providers. The end consumer is then forced to pay double for unlimited access to the Internet. I don't entirely follow this part. Could someone clarify? Is "operating at their highest capacity" a bad thing? Is the implication "operating at their highest capacity [without expanding capacity when they should]"?
- 1gn1t10n 11y ago
  > Is "operating at their highest capacity" a bad thing? Yes, it's a bad thing. Internet traffic is bursty so usually you have to overprovision a lot to deal with the spikes. Operating at full capacity means that they get money for a service that they cannot fullfil. This is their intended goal such that later they can ask money from whoever wants to have priority.
  - fiber 11y ago
thomaskcr 11y ago
> They now also want to collect revenue by charging large content providers fees for access to their network Isn't what they are advocating for the exact opposite of net neutrality? Everyone's connection is saturated, but they argue that because they are a large content provider they should get special treatment and not need to pay for direct access. Smaller companies are equally affected during peak hours, but they would need to pay for that same privilege? If not, what is too small? There seems to be a trend of adding "free peering" into the net neutrality debate. Unless you're carrying equal bit-miles, free shouldn't even enter into the equation. If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction. I think a lot of companies are leveraging the current hate for cable companies to get out of properly engineering their infrastructure. People have leased lines, built out additional datacenters and paid for colos around the world for years and it was never "extortion" until a popular company twisted the definition of net neutrality a bit so they wouldn't need to build their own datacenters.
- asdfaoeu 11y ago
  >There seems to be a trend of adding "free peering" into the net neutrality debate. Unless you're carrying equal bit-miles, free shouldn't even enter into the equation. If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction. I think the difference here with CDN provided traffic is the bit miles are basically zero so I don't think that argument really holds up.
  - thomaskcr 11y ago
    I see your point - but it's their content (or content they are being paid to serve at least). Cogent carries data between ISPs regardless of origin/destination for many of their runs -- while they are being paid by their clients for access to their network, Comcast can also push a significant amount of data destined for non Cogent customers through their lines. If you're only offering routes for your customers, you're not offering the ISP anything that you don't benefit from. I would think rules enforcing net neutrality would explicitly not allow this. If I am a small time host with 20 clients, a host with 5000 clients shouldn't get a direct connection for free while I would need to pay. Both my clients and their clients are equally affected.
kintamanimatt 11y ago
"We at Hetzner Online do not support such policies and declare our support for full net neutrality." Bullshit. In the same breath they offer something that is entirely antithetical to their stated ethos, no matter how they spin it. This page demonstrates what they say and what they do are two different things. I interpret this as they're making a goldbrick statement of support in favor of net neutrality with the hope that they won't face a backlash. I will never touch Hetzner so long as they act against net neutrality.
- 0x006A 11y ago
  They are transparent about DTAG not participating in Tire 1 peering for free. They offer a way to pay for this on a per server basis if you don't want to participate in this standoff. I much prefer this to Hetzner silently paying DTAG and increasing the hosting costs for everyone.
- brainpeel 11y ago
  When Hetzner say "some Germany ISPs" they actually mean Deutsche Telekom – Germany's largest ISP with almost 50% market share and also the only Tier 1 network. Deutsche Telekom has been squeezing everyone for transit bandwidth. They're also the only network and ISP to NOT peer with DE-CIX. (they only added their first 10Gbps uplink just a few months ago) I've even seen Akamai bottleneck for weeks on end until they agreed to pay for more 10Gbps ports to DTAG. What Hetzner Online is offering is merely an effective solution to alleviating a real problem. Supporting net neutrality won't fix your paying users video streaming QoS issues. As frustrating as it is as a matter of principle, many companies will want to utilize an offering like Hetzner's.
CodingGuy 11y ago
I'm hosting my server with Hetzner and using Cloudflare in front of my sites. So the connection for my site visitors looks like this: Hetzner => Cloudflare (local pop) => visitor. Works perfectly without paying for an additional uplink as the connection between Cloudflare and Hetzner is quite fast.
- Pyxl101 11y ago
  Cloudflare has written about running into challenges regarding net neutrality too: https://blog.cloudflare.com/net-neutrality/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/net-neutrality/ Their article about the relative cost of bandwidth around the world made the rounds on Hacker News when it came out: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a... > Australia is the most expensive region in which we operate, but for an interesting reason. We peer with virtually every ISP in the region except one: Telstra. Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world — 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps). Given that we are able to peer approximately half of our traffic, the effective bandwidth benchmark price is $100/Mbps. Cloudflare supposedly buys transit from transit providers. However, since it's serving cached data locally from each POP, presumably that means that connections from a site visitor to Cloudflare are served locally, for cached assets, rather than being passed on across transit to Hetzner.
Pyxl101 11y ago
Could we speed the Internet up with more generic caching? I'd theorize that a decent percentage of all Internet traffic to residential ISPs is made up of HTTP requests for highly cacheable resources. However, it seems like the mythical idea of an automatic caching HTTP proxy at the ISP level never really materialized. Perhaps that was possible in the HTTP days, but HTTPS makes it a challenge. How much better would Internet congestion be if there was a way for ISPs to cache commonly-referenced resources? They could even be video resources - if Netflix requests its videos across an HTTP connection by identifying a single common resource (a URL everyone will access who plays the video), then an ISP could simply cache the URL and serve it locally. It seems like HTTPS is a barrier to schemes like that. Instead of an ISP running a generic cache for commonly-referenced resources, each website provider needs to run a local POP that's trusted and knows just their content. (Though maybe Cloudflare like solutions are possible where the POP is not fully trusted.) If we set HTTPS aside for a moment, could we speed the Internet up with caching? How much of the traffic to saturated links are requests for the same content over and over again? Is there a conceptual way to achieve some of the privacy benefits from HTTPS while allowing an ISP to cache content in a generic way? Or could an ISP offer a discount for using HTTP traffic instead of HTTPS, and then cache content in a protocol-compliant way?
- throwaway2048 11y ago
  the entire point is ISPs are acting in bad faith looking for a payday, the limitations are not technical, but purely artifical rent seeking bullshit. They are not interested in solutions that do not involve paying them money.
- Natanael_L 11y ago
  I do think it could be neat with the support for a tag for "this is can be cached" in TLS streams, which could be applied to privacy unsensitive material, which identifies the ciphertext blob and thus lets the ISP tell the server sending it "I'm now going to cache this blob, tell every client on my network to use the same decryption key for this blob for X time and I'll hand them my cached copy". Presumably you'd have to use a signed hash of the ciphertext as the identifier, and decouple the encryption of these blobs from the rest of the TLS stream (use independent key material) to ensure it remains secure. But this way, any ISP that sees the same blob appearing frequently can chose to cache it automatically and quickly start saving bandwidth. Also, for maximizing privacy, I think this tag should be applied by the client only (can be disabled if you want to reduce metadata leaks) when the server tells the client "this particular data with identifier X can be auto-cached on the network level". One potential neat advantage here is that a LAN router/proxy could implement a cache for its own nodes by having the nodes send these cache requests directly to this router instead of letting the ISP see it, so you don't leak this metadata outside your own network.
Mojah 11y ago
Aren't they basically saying "We support net neutrality but since we have no choice, we'll pay for priority access"?
- blueflow 11y ago
  More "We support net neutrality but since we have no choice, we'll allow you to pay for priority access for your server". Its opt-in.
deleted 11y ago
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- deleted 11y ago
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ullus12 11y ago
DTAG is the Network Operator for most of German Business and Private Customers. Most DSL-Resellers are Business Customers of DTAG. So maybe there point of view, beeing more important than any public exchange, is not far fetched as it is most certainly a business reality. Hetzner making a stand for net neutrality is a joke. They are asking your money for better service.
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  If DTAG asked for 1 EUR/Gigabyte, would you still maintain that position? 10 EUR? 100 EUR? Is there any point where you would consider the behaviour of DTAG inappropriate/unfair? BTW, nobody is denying that they in fact are an important ISP, where "important" means "lots of customers", which in turn means "lots of power". Someone holding a gun to your head also has a lot of power and thus is important to you - but power in neither case automatically implies that any offer the powerful party is making is a fair offer, be it that they ask you to give them all your money to avoid being killed, or that they ask you to pay massively above-market rates to avoid being unreachable for their customer base.
ullus12 11y ago
Hetzner is not just saving on private peerings. Most of their Servers are in east-germany where * labor,land,power,darkfibre is cheaper * they can harvest developement subs from the goverment [1] Whereas peering (DE-CIX) is most dense in Frankfurt, West-Germany. [1] https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.datacenterpark.de%2F https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...
- zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
  1. What's the logic here? Because a business is trying to reduce its expenses, it's wrong on any matter by default? 2. You are aware that DTAG does not peer at DE-CIX, so whether "peering is most dense" there has exactly no influence on whether Hetzner gets good connectivity to DTAG? 3. You are aware that Hetzner does peer at DE-CIX with 200 Gbit/s, with an open peering policy? 4. You are aware that Hetzner even peers at AMS-IX in Amsterdam with 100 Gbit/s? That link almost certainly is even more expensive than the one to DE-CIX. see also, peering list close to the end: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Rechenzentren_und_Anbindung/en http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Rechenzentren_und_Anbindung...
  - ullus12 11y ago
    1. The idea was to make an example of the company favoring cost effevtiveness over quality. which may not be bad ... but it should underline the cheap-assiness. 2. dtag is ofc present in frankfurt and at de-cix, with little capacity for public peerings as mentioned. This and your 3/4 each make sense, as they represent a legit business interest for the different sides. Hetzner preffering cheapass open and dtag preffering scalable private peerings. Problem i see is Hetzner externalizing the cost of private peerings. Which in return plays into 1. and the example of them externalizing other cost factors.
    - tveita 11y ago
      Without any additional details your contrasting of "cheapass open" vs "scalable private peerings" seems completely baseless. Why is DTAG not the cheapass for skimping on their public pairings?
bakhy 11y ago
what if, for example, Netflix did something like this, and charged a higher subscription fee to, e.g., Comcast customers? though i don't believe this would solve the problem, it might bring the issue of net neutrality closer to home for many customers, and weigh on their decision which ISP to take (if they even have the choice, which would be an issue in the US, i presume?). and it's ultimately fair - why would all users pay for this through their subscriptions, if only some ISPs violate net neutrality.
- SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
  I think this would settle the net neutrality debate practically overnight and personally back this suggestion 100%!
- rayuela 11y ago
  This doesn't work when Comcast offers services that directly compete with Netflix, it just makes Comcast streaming services seem relatively less expensive.
rmoriz 11y ago
Did anyone verify the information? I think it's a hoax to drive cusomers mad/against Deutsche Telekom. - It's not possible to announce a specific (premium) routing for just a single IP address. - Hetzner has no DTAG Transit anymore. none. Not even for specific customers. See AS24940 - Current DTAG->Hetzner traffic uses AS33891. See https://f-lga1.f.de.net.dtag.de/ https://f-lga1.f.de.net.dtag.de/ Of course this does not object the non-peering-policy claims and high prices of DTAG in any way. It's well known in the German ISP scene.
- the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
  Verification for which part? Hetzner used to have DTAG peering but dropped it a year ago because Telecom wants to have a premium paid for it. Hetzner was not willing to carve. This is just the response to some customers wanting to have faster connection to T customers. This story is unfortunately not new. //EDIT: this thread goes back more than two years: https://telekomhilft.telekom.de/t5/Telefonie-Internet/Performance-Telekom-lt-gt-Hetzner-seit-Anfang-Dezember-schlecht/td-p/1207632 https://telekomhilft.telekom.de/t5/Telefonie-Internet/Perfor...
- amazon_not 11y ago
  > I think it's a hoax to drive cusomers mad/against Deutsche Telekom. You don't need a hoax for that. Everybody in the industry is already pissed at DTAG. > - It's not possible to announce a specific (premium) routing for just a single IP address. Wrong. Google source based routing. You'll get asymmetric routing, but that's rarely an issue for content providers. > - Current DTAG->Hetzner traffic uses AS33891 That's exactly what the article states.
  - rmoriz 11y ago
    > That's exactly what the article states. No. Hetzner is not able to provide direct Telekom traffic. Their offer is missleading. Hetzner makes a profit of 36mio EUR/year. It's a shady move. Telekom sucks but Hetzner is not any better.
    - fweespeech 11y ago
zuckerei 11y ago
I have a Server in Germany. But my visitors are from all over the world. Will I have to pay to every ISP out there so my data gets to their customers quick?
- Nyr 11y ago
  No, since you will be forced to use transit to reach many of your visitors. You don't even have the choice of direct connections to all of the world with just a single server in Germany.
  - scurvy 11y ago
    There are reach products that will help you connect and peer to providers in remote IX's. You can peer with them directly, then have their traffic ride on your network all the way back. MPLS is a wonderful thing. Yeah, you'll still need a lot of transit to reach people, but you can also peer with who you want.
    - fiber 11y ago
      Provided "who you want" wants to peer with you. Peering is a mutual relationship after all.
      - scurvy 11y ago
        Most public peering IX's have route servers which have "most" of the routes available on the exchange. Peer with that and you have almost all of the routes available on the exchange. Of course, some entities might not advertise everything to the route server, but most do in my experience.
        Nyr 11y ago
        > Most public peering IX's have route servers which have "most" of the routes available on the exchange. Doesn't matter when we are talking about DTAG, which is the dominant ISP and will not peer for free. Yeah, you can peer with a lot of smaller networks which is nice, but not enough. Same applies for the US market where the big players refuse to peer.
metalliqaz 11y ago
This is the correct approach. The ISP pulls their bullshit. Service passes the cost on to customers. Customers move to different ISP. ISP eventually learns lesson. Of course, this only works if there is competition between ISPs.
- nulltype 11y ago
  Wait, but the customers here are Hetzner's customers, right? How would they move to a different ISP?
  - Mahn 11y ago
    Hetzner is not an ISP but a hosting/servers/colocation company. The ISPs are the companies end customers are using to access internet in the first place (Deutsche Telekom, AT&T, etc)
- tajen 11y ago
  Yes, and where are the JS libraries that show a warning to customers of networks operating at lower capacity? All ISPs have available bandwidth for speedtest.com, but when it comes to Youtube or Netflix, it requires a warning.
  - bduerst 11y ago
    SpeedOf.me works pretty well, but it would be nice to have a browser extension that notified me whenever a site loaded more slowly for me than others in the region on different ISP.
    - herbst 11y ago
      Thats a great idea actually. I may also try to track ISP and times on one of my more popular websites.
amazon_not 11y ago
A simple way to avoid paying double for traffic is just to host your servers directly at Core-Backbone, instead of funneling your traffic from Hetzner via Core-Backbone to DTAG.
kennysmoothx 11y ago
I hope this does not fall on deafs ears but I am experiencing this EXACT thing with OVH(Canada's Mega Datacentre). I have compared speeds directly to OVH's servers, and indirectly through a reverse proxy, and AT&T throttles direct connections to OVH. When I prompted OVH about it they confirmed to me that AT&T requested that they pay them for priority bandwidth and they refused (as is their right) and now my customers get throttled to 200 kb/s when accessing my servers on OVH. PS. OVH has arguably the largest data center in North America so this means a lot of services are being affected by these ISP's.
- scurvy 11y ago
  Speeds in which direction? To OVH or from OVH?
- ehPReth 11y ago
  This may be a bit unrelated, but OVH provides a publicly accessible weather map of their network (something I wish more ISPs/providers did): http://weathermap.ovh.net/ http://weathermap.ovh.net/
scurvy 11y ago
I would take this a lot more seriously if Hetzner were not home to about 20% of the banned/fraud IP's on my network. I find it highly ironic that they get up on their high horse and start preaching about how to properly run a network (when they completely ignore what's going on inside theirs).
theklub 11y ago
We need an Open ISP movement... Maybe there is one already but I mean like a non-profit ISP type deal.

356 points by revelation 11y ago

I'm not sure how to interpret this post. Is this basically: "we believe in network neutrality, but here's reality for today: your ISP won't expand capacity, so you can pay us to add special uplink"? It looks like testing the ground for idea of "pay per peering" that becomes a separate line on your invoice. (and I mean for any peering, you rent server and connectivity separately)

kogepathic 11y ago
I don't think it's quite as you put it. I think Hetzner is saying more: === We believe in net neutrality, but some of our customers have noticed that users of these telecom companies cannot access their services during peak hours, or the service is quite slow. Since we cannot change market dynamics, we are offering our customers a way to offer their customers faster service during peak periods with this "pay per peering" option. === My understanding (which may be incorrect) is that Hetnzer is telling existing customers that instead of having to install servers within the ISP network, they can instead pay a marginal fee per month to bypass the congested peering links to these providers.
thateclipseguy 11y ago
Well, it's not really a case of net neutrality. Packets aren't being given priority. It's just a simple case of: ISPs are at capacity, connection slow, use these servers instead.
j_jochem 11y ago
I think this might actually a good idea. Instead of just paying the peering fee quietly, they give customers the choice to vote with their money. Alas, "customers" here are not end users, but companies who provide content on the internet. I really like that paying up to DTAG is not the default and is more bureaucratic. This might already be enough to kill the ISPs' profiteering schemes, similiar to what happened with the Leistungsschutzrecht (see https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_publishers https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ancillary_copyright_for_press_...) in Germany.
- digikata 11y ago
  I think more visibility is better, and in this case maybe would give tech companies some food for thought re: how they approach net neutrality issues in politics.
codingminds 11y ago
It's more like "Your customers/users ISP (in practice DTAG, Deutsche Telekom AG) doesn't participate much in cost-neutral Tier-1 peerings and instead offers an expensive DTAG peering for additional bandwidth". DTAG can do this because they are (one of) the biggest ISP in germany.
chronial 11y ago
> Make sure to clearly state that you would like to order the DTAG uplink in the text field of the request and that you agree to pay the additional € 4.20 a month. The add-on will be called "Double Paid Traffic" on your bill. I think the name "double paid traffic" is a very clear statement. They are not trying to sugarcoat this or anything. They just don't want to loose customers over this.

Pyxl101 11y ago

Frequently it seems as though statements by neutrality advocates mention "providers" without naming any. Who are the providers that misbehave, and what are they doing? Can we see a graph of their traffic and a depiction of the misbehavior? (Saturated links, offers to peer and expand the links that are refused, etc.) I'd love it if the evidence were laid out. Unfortunately at the moment, it seems like there's a lot of ambiguous finger-pointing. What do (presumably) Comcast and these other companies say when you communicate with them about peering, and you ask them why they won't? Anyone with insight into these issues care to share the DLS/cable provider perspective? (Is there some kind of reasonable argument there we're not hearing - "Infrastructure costs are rising, you see, and we built the infrastructure we have now with a government subsidy that's no longer available. So when we expand, it's going to cost 10x as much ... " just to make something up. Is there another side to the story, or is it really just supply/demand where the providers exploit their market power? "Our customers are not likely to drop our Internet service for a competitor just because Netflix is slow. In fact, our data show that they start watching cable TV more, which is good for us - we want cable TV to be sticky. So we'll charge a fee since we're nearly a monopoly and the market will sustain it. Further, since Netflix is where all the traffic is going, we'll just charge them directly rather than expand pipes all around".) [edits] > For this reason, interfaces are being operated at their highest capacity -- to make paid access to the DSL and cable providers' networks attractive for content providers. The end consumer is then forced to pay double for unlimited access to the Internet. I don't entirely follow this part. Could someone clarify? Is "operating at their highest capacity" a bad thing? Is the implication "operating at their highest capacity [without expanding capacity when they should]"?

1gn1t10n 11y ago
> Is "operating at their highest capacity" a bad thing? Yes, it's a bad thing. Internet traffic is bursty so usually you have to overprovision a lot to deal with the spikes. Operating at full capacity means that they get money for a service that they cannot fullfil. This is their intended goal such that later they can ask money from whoever wants to have priority.
- fiber 11y ago

thomaskcr 11y ago

> They now also want to collect revenue by charging large content providers fees for access to their network Isn't what they are advocating for the exact opposite of net neutrality? Everyone's connection is saturated, but they argue that because they are a large content provider they should get special treatment and not need to pay for direct access. Smaller companies are equally affected during peak hours, but they would need to pay for that same privilege? If not, what is too small? There seems to be a trend of adding "free peering" into the net neutrality debate. Unless you're carrying equal bit-miles, free shouldn't even enter into the equation. If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction. I think a lot of companies are leveraging the current hate for cable companies to get out of properly engineering their infrastructure. People have leased lines, built out additional datacenters and paid for colos around the world for years and it was never "extortion" until a popular company twisted the definition of net neutrality a bit so they wouldn't need to build their own datacenters.

asdfaoeu 11y ago
>There seems to be a trend of adding "free peering" into the net neutrality debate. Unless you're carrying equal bit-miles, free shouldn't even enter into the equation. If data flows unequally, money should flow the other direction. I think the difference here with CDN provided traffic is the bit miles are basically zero so I don't think that argument really holds up.
- thomaskcr 11y ago
  I see your point - but it's their content (or content they are being paid to serve at least). Cogent carries data between ISPs regardless of origin/destination for many of their runs -- while they are being paid by their clients for access to their network, Comcast can also push a significant amount of data destined for non Cogent customers through their lines. If you're only offering routes for your customers, you're not offering the ISP anything that you don't benefit from. I would think rules enforcing net neutrality would explicitly not allow this. If I am a small time host with 20 clients, a host with 5000 clients shouldn't get a direct connection for free while I would need to pay. Both my clients and their clients are equally affected.

kintamanimatt 11y ago

"We at Hetzner Online do not support such policies and declare our support for full net neutrality." Bullshit. In the same breath they offer something that is entirely antithetical to their stated ethos, no matter how they spin it. This page demonstrates what they say and what they do are two different things. I interpret this as they're making a goldbrick statement of support in favor of net neutrality with the hope that they won't face a backlash. I will never touch Hetzner so long as they act against net neutrality.

0x006A 11y ago
They are transparent about DTAG not participating in Tire 1 peering for free. They offer a way to pay for this on a per server basis if you don't want to participate in this standoff. I much prefer this to Hetzner silently paying DTAG and increasing the hosting costs for everyone.
brainpeel 11y ago
When Hetzner say "some Germany ISPs" they actually mean Deutsche Telekom – Germany's largest ISP with almost 50% market share and also the only Tier 1 network. Deutsche Telekom has been squeezing everyone for transit bandwidth. They're also the only network and ISP to NOT peer with DE-CIX. (they only added their first 10Gbps uplink just a few months ago) I've even seen Akamai bottleneck for weeks on end until they agreed to pay for more 10Gbps ports to DTAG. What Hetzner Online is offering is merely an effective solution to alleviating a real problem. Supporting net neutrality won't fix your paying users video streaming QoS issues. As frustrating as it is as a matter of principle, many companies will want to utilize an offering like Hetzner's.

CodingGuy 11y ago

I'm hosting my server with Hetzner and using Cloudflare in front of my sites. So the connection for my site visitors looks like this: Hetzner => Cloudflare (local pop) => visitor. Works perfectly without paying for an additional uplink as the connection between Cloudflare and Hetzner is quite fast.

Pyxl101 11y ago
Cloudflare has written about running into challenges regarding net neutrality too: https://blog.cloudflare.com/net-neutrality/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/net-neutrality/ Their article about the relative cost of bandwidth around the world made the rounds on Hacker News when it came out: https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-around-the-world/ https://blog.cloudflare.com/the-relative-cost-of-bandwidth-a... > Australia is the most expensive region in which we operate, but for an interesting reason. We peer with virtually every ISP in the region except one: Telstra. Telstra, which controls approximately 50% of the market, and was traditionally the monopoly telecom provider, charges some of the highest transit pricing in the world — 20x the benchmark ($200/Mbps). Given that we are able to peer approximately half of our traffic, the effective bandwidth benchmark price is $100/Mbps. Cloudflare supposedly buys transit from transit providers. However, since it's serving cached data locally from each POP, presumably that means that connections from a site visitor to Cloudflare are served locally, for cached assets, rather than being passed on across transit to Hetzner.

Pyxl101 11y ago

Could we speed the Internet up with more generic caching? I'd theorize that a decent percentage of all Internet traffic to residential ISPs is made up of HTTP requests for highly cacheable resources. However, it seems like the mythical idea of an automatic caching HTTP proxy at the ISP level never really materialized. Perhaps that was possible in the HTTP days, but HTTPS makes it a challenge. How much better would Internet congestion be if there was a way for ISPs to cache commonly-referenced resources? They could even be video resources - if Netflix requests its videos across an HTTP connection by identifying a single common resource (a URL everyone will access who plays the video), then an ISP could simply cache the URL and serve it locally. It seems like HTTPS is a barrier to schemes like that. Instead of an ISP running a generic cache for commonly-referenced resources, each website provider needs to run a local POP that's trusted and knows just their content. (Though maybe Cloudflare like solutions are possible where the POP is not fully trusted.) If we set HTTPS aside for a moment, could we speed the Internet up with caching? How much of the traffic to saturated links are requests for the same content over and over again? Is there a conceptual way to achieve some of the privacy benefits from HTTPS while allowing an ISP to cache content in a generic way? Or could an ISP offer a discount for using HTTP traffic instead of HTTPS, and then cache content in a protocol-compliant way?

throwaway2048 11y ago
the entire point is ISPs are acting in bad faith looking for a payday, the limitations are not technical, but purely artifical rent seeking bullshit. They are not interested in solutions that do not involve paying them money.
Natanael_L 11y ago
I do think it could be neat with the support for a tag for "this is can be cached" in TLS streams, which could be applied to privacy unsensitive material, which identifies the ciphertext blob and thus lets the ISP tell the server sending it "I'm now going to cache this blob, tell every client on my network to use the same decryption key for this blob for X time and I'll hand them my cached copy". Presumably you'd have to use a signed hash of the ciphertext as the identifier, and decouple the encryption of these blobs from the rest of the TLS stream (use independent key material) to ensure it remains secure. But this way, any ISP that sees the same blob appearing frequently can chose to cache it automatically and quickly start saving bandwidth. Also, for maximizing privacy, I think this tag should be applied by the client only (can be disabled if you want to reduce metadata leaks) when the server tells the client "this particular data with identifier X can be auto-cached on the network level". One potential neat advantage here is that a LAN router/proxy could implement a cache for its own nodes by having the nodes send these cache requests directly to this router instead of letting the ISP see it, so you don't leak this metadata outside your own network.

Mojah 11y ago

Aren't they basically saying "We support net neutrality but since we have no choice, we'll pay for priority access"?

blueflow 11y ago
More "We support net neutrality but since we have no choice, we'll allow you to pay for priority access for your server". Its opt-in.

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ullus12 11y ago

DTAG is the Network Operator for most of German Business and Private Customers. Most DSL-Resellers are Business Customers of DTAG. So maybe there point of view, beeing more important than any public exchange, is not far fetched as it is most certainly a business reality. Hetzner making a stand for net neutrality is a joke. They are asking your money for better service.

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
If DTAG asked for 1 EUR/Gigabyte, would you still maintain that position? 10 EUR? 100 EUR? Is there any point where you would consider the behaviour of DTAG inappropriate/unfair? BTW, nobody is denying that they in fact are an important ISP, where "important" means "lots of customers", which in turn means "lots of power". Someone holding a gun to your head also has a lot of power and thus is important to you - but power in neither case automatically implies that any offer the powerful party is making is a fair offer, be it that they ask you to give them all your money to avoid being killed, or that they ask you to pay massively above-market rates to avoid being unreachable for their customer base.

ullus12 11y ago

Hetzner is not just saving on private peerings. Most of their Servers are in east-germany where * labor,land,power,darkfibre is cheaper * they can harvest developement subs from the goverment [1] Whereas peering (DE-CIX) is most dense in Frankfurt, West-Germany. [1] https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.datacenterpark.de%2F https://translate.google.de/translate?hl=de&sl=de&tl=en&u=ht...

zAy0LfpBZLC8mAC 11y ago
1. What's the logic here? Because a business is trying to reduce its expenses, it's wrong on any matter by default? 2. You are aware that DTAG does not peer at DE-CIX, so whether "peering is most dense" there has exactly no influence on whether Hetzner gets good connectivity to DTAG? 3. You are aware that Hetzner does peer at DE-CIX with 200 Gbit/s, with an open peering policy? 4. You are aware that Hetzner even peers at AMS-IX in Amsterdam with 100 Gbit/s? That link almost certainly is even more expensive than the one to DE-CIX. see also, peering list close to the end: http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Rechenzentren_und_Anbindung/en http://wiki.hetzner.de/index.php/Rechenzentren_und_Anbindung...
- ullus12 11y ago
  1. The idea was to make an example of the company favoring cost effevtiveness over quality. which may not be bad ... but it should underline the cheap-assiness. 2. dtag is ofc present in frankfurt and at de-cix, with little capacity for public peerings as mentioned. This and your 3/4 each make sense, as they represent a legit business interest for the different sides. Hetzner preffering cheapass open and dtag preffering scalable private peerings. Problem i see is Hetzner externalizing the cost of private peerings. Which in return plays into 1. and the example of them externalizing other cost factors.
  - tveita 11y ago
    Without any additional details your contrasting of "cheapass open" vs "scalable private peerings" seems completely baseless. Why is DTAG not the cheapass for skimping on their public pairings?

bakhy 11y ago

what if, for example, Netflix did something like this, and charged a higher subscription fee to, e.g., Comcast customers? though i don't believe this would solve the problem, it might bring the issue of net neutrality closer to home for many customers, and weigh on their decision which ISP to take (if they even have the choice, which would be an issue in the US, i presume?). and it's ultimately fair - why would all users pay for this through their subscriptions, if only some ISPs violate net neutrality.

SmellyGeekBoy 11y ago
I think this would settle the net neutrality debate practically overnight and personally back this suggestion 100%!
rayuela 11y ago
This doesn't work when Comcast offers services that directly compete with Netflix, it just makes Comcast streaming services seem relatively less expensive.

rmoriz 11y ago

Did anyone verify the information? I think it's a hoax to drive cusomers mad/against Deutsche Telekom. - It's not possible to announce a specific (premium) routing for just a single IP address. - Hetzner has no DTAG Transit anymore. none. Not even for specific customers. See AS24940 - Current DTAG->Hetzner traffic uses AS33891. See https://f-lga1.f.de.net.dtag.de/ https://f-lga1.f.de.net.dtag.de/ Of course this does not object the non-peering-policy claims and high prices of DTAG in any way. It's well known in the German ISP scene.

the_mitsuhiko 11y ago
Verification for which part? Hetzner used to have DTAG peering but dropped it a year ago because Telecom wants to have a premium paid for it. Hetzner was not willing to carve. This is just the response to some customers wanting to have faster connection to T customers. This story is unfortunately not new. //EDIT: this thread goes back more than two years: https://telekomhilft.telekom.de/t5/Telefonie-Internet/Performance-Telekom-lt-gt-Hetzner-seit-Anfang-Dezember-schlecht/td-p/1207632 https://telekomhilft.telekom.de/t5/Telefonie-Internet/Perfor...
amazon_not 11y ago
> I think it's a hoax to drive cusomers mad/against Deutsche Telekom. You don't need a hoax for that. Everybody in the industry is already pissed at DTAG. > - It's not possible to announce a specific (premium) routing for just a single IP address. Wrong. Google source based routing. You'll get asymmetric routing, but that's rarely an issue for content providers. > - Current DTAG->Hetzner traffic uses AS33891 That's exactly what the article states.
- rmoriz 11y ago
  > That's exactly what the article states. No. Hetzner is not able to provide direct Telekom traffic. Their offer is missleading. Hetzner makes a profit of 36mio EUR/year. It's a shady move. Telekom sucks but Hetzner is not any better.
  - fweespeech 11y ago

zuckerei 11y ago

I have a Server in Germany. But my visitors are from all over the world. Will I have to pay to every ISP out there so my data gets to their customers quick?

Nyr 11y ago
No, since you will be forced to use transit to reach many of your visitors. You don't even have the choice of direct connections to all of the world with just a single server in Germany.
- scurvy 11y ago
  There are reach products that will help you connect and peer to providers in remote IX's. You can peer with them directly, then have their traffic ride on your network all the way back. MPLS is a wonderful thing. Yeah, you'll still need a lot of transit to reach people, but you can also peer with who you want.
  - fiber 11y ago
    Provided "who you want" wants to peer with you. Peering is a mutual relationship after all.
    - scurvy 11y ago
      Most public peering IX's have route servers which have "most" of the routes available on the exchange. Peer with that and you have almost all of the routes available on the exchange. Of course, some entities might not advertise everything to the route server, but most do in my experience.
      - Nyr 11y ago
        > Most public peering IX's have route servers which have "most" of the routes available on the exchange. Doesn't matter when we are talking about DTAG, which is the dominant ISP and will not peer for free. Yeah, you can peer with a lot of smaller networks which is nice, but not enough. Same applies for the US market where the big players refuse to peer.

metalliqaz 11y ago

This is the correct approach. The ISP pulls their bullshit. Service passes the cost on to customers. Customers move to different ISP. ISP eventually learns lesson. Of course, this only works if there is competition between ISPs.

nulltype 11y ago
Wait, but the customers here are Hetzner's customers, right? How would they move to a different ISP?
- Mahn 11y ago
  Hetzner is not an ISP but a hosting/servers/colocation company. The ISPs are the companies end customers are using to access internet in the first place (Deutsche Telekom, AT&T, etc)
tajen 11y ago
Yes, and where are the JS libraries that show a warning to customers of networks operating at lower capacity? All ISPs have available bandwidth for speedtest.com, but when it comes to Youtube or Netflix, it requires a warning.
- bduerst 11y ago
  SpeedOf.me works pretty well, but it would be nice to have a browser extension that notified me whenever a site loaded more slowly for me than others in the region on different ISP.
  - herbst 11y ago
    Thats a great idea actually. I may also try to track ISP and times on one of my more popular websites.

amazon_not 11y ago

A simple way to avoid paying double for traffic is just to host your servers directly at Core-Backbone, instead of funneling your traffic from Hetzner via Core-Backbone to DTAG.

kennysmoothx 11y ago

I hope this does not fall on deafs ears but I am experiencing this EXACT thing with OVH(Canada's Mega Datacentre). I have compared speeds directly to OVH's servers, and indirectly through a reverse proxy, and AT&T throttles direct connections to OVH. When I prompted OVH about it they confirmed to me that AT&T requested that they pay them for priority bandwidth and they refused (as is their right) and now my customers get throttled to 200 kb/s when accessing my servers on OVH. PS. OVH has arguably the largest data center in North America so this means a lot of services are being affected by these ISP's.

scurvy 11y ago
Speeds in which direction? To OVH or from OVH?
ehPReth 11y ago
This may be a bit unrelated, but OVH provides a publicly accessible weather map of their network (something I wish more ISPs/providers did): http://weathermap.ovh.net/ http://weathermap.ovh.net/

scurvy 11y ago

I would take this a lot more seriously if Hetzner were not home to about 20% of the banned/fraud IP's on my network. I find it highly ironic that they get up on their high horse and start preaching about how to properly run a network (when they completely ignore what's going on inside theirs).

theklub 11y ago

We need an Open ISP movement... Maybe there is one already but I mean like a non-profit ISP type deal.