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Frequently it seems as though statements by neutrality advocates mention "providers" without naming any. Who are the providers that misbehave, and what are they

by 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
  That is just a different way of saying their (DSL) customers are their product, not their customers.
Ao7bei3s 11y ago
> Who are the providers that misbehave The article is about T-Systems (AS-DTAG), which is the largest ISP in Germany and basically the company we mean when we talk about net neutrality violation here. Look at the speeds of their exchange points: https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/196 https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/196 - 34 Gbps total: 1x 20G, 1x 10G, 4x 1G. Seriously, 1Gbps! Now compare with another ISP with only 25% the revenue: https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/997 https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/997 - 890 GBps total.
- ullus12 11y ago
  Yet you can expect Cable service (Kabeldeutschland/Vodafone) to be to be lossy/congested at every days peek hours. Whereas DTAG _does_ way better. I dont like it, but as others have said: Relying on transit peering will not work well once you reach certain traffic levels. Also you can get Servers from Strato (DTAG Sub) for about the same price as from Hetzner and pump your Traffic directly into a Tier1.
  - Ao7bei3s 11y ago
    Vodafone doesn't just offer cable service but also DSL and VDSL, and that's rock solid. The cable service slowdowns are technology inherent. But that's a last-mile problem and not a backbone problem. Also, these providers aren't trying to use their customer base to extort money from hosters.
    - ullus12 11y ago
      Agree on the last-mile part yet i doubt that buying from a (DSL-)Reseller is improving service quality and prices are roughly the same.
  - Tepix 11y ago
    I'm a Unitymedia customer in Germany (200mbps down, 10mbps up for 42€/month including VoIP) and they have been pretty good in terms of speed. I haven't noticed any slowdowns. They also make sure that you get a little extra bandwidth so even with overhead you will actually see those advertised transfer rates in the wild.
thecatspaw 11y ago
> Is "operating at their highest capacity" a bad thing? Yes. This allows providers to say "guys look, we can not increase the traffic going over the lines, so we have to priorize things. Thats 3.50€ a month per uplink"
sajal83 11y ago
> 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]"? Yes. Basically existing links (thru transit providers) is saturated, if you(content provider) want good connectivity with these end-user networks you gotta pay more for direct connection.
MrBuddyCasino 11y ago
The latter. There is no incentive to pay for additional bandwidth if there is enough capacity for everyone, so supply is restricted. Thus the ISP saves on network infrastructure and gets additional income to prioritize higher-status traffic. What a clusterfuck, I'm embarrassed by my government.
- icebraining 11y ago
  My question is: why aren't the companies being asked to pay for priority telling their users about the problem? Where are the JS libraries that show a warning to the users of those ISPs?
Coding_Cat 11y ago
I think you are right about the implication. The providers tend to try and double dip by doing one of three things: * Not upgrading their network as they should * Discriminating against certain traffic, see Comcast and Netflix speeds * or by not allowing content providers to connect their CDNs free of charge, which should be a win-win situation if the providers acted in the customers best interests. I honestly believe that these bussiness practices are the providers digging their own grave. Best case scenario, they make a few quick bucks before laws get passed against this sort of thing, worst case scenario: the big boys get tired of dealing with them and start competing directly (like Google fiber).
Spooky23 11y ago
In an (admittedly different) enterprise scenario, I see consistent 50-60% peak utilization as right-sized. 75% or more is tagged for an upgrade or at least analysis to understand the traffic patterns. For a big network to deliver 100 Mbps vs. 1 Mbps connectivity to most locations is a very small cost. The big costs are the fixed costs the initial buildout. Marginal capacity changes are pretty cheap. There's no technical reason to treat network links as constrained resources. So as a network provider, you only create constraint to make money. Think of it as food & drink in a movie theatre. A bag of popcorn at the Target snack counter is $1.50. A bag of popcorn at the movies is $9. Same product, both high-margin scenarios -- the difference is you're captive to the movie theatre.
- scurvy 11y ago
  We start the process to add more peering ports once we see sustained traffic at 40% of port capacity (in PPS or BPS). The process takes a while depending on who you're dealing with, and before you know it, you're up to 80% right before that new port comes online.

by Pyxl101 11y ago

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
That is just a different way of saying their (DSL) customers are their product, not their customers.

Ao7bei3s 11y ago

> Who are the providers that misbehave The article is about T-Systems (AS-DTAG), which is the largest ISP in Germany and basically the company we mean when we talk about net neutrality violation here. Look at the speeds of their exchange points: https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/196 https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/196 - 34 Gbps total: 1x 20G, 1x 10G, 4x 1G. Seriously, 1Gbps! Now compare with another ISP with only 25% the revenue: https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/997 https://beta.peeringdb.com/net/997 - 890 GBps total.

ullus12 11y ago
Yet you can expect Cable service (Kabeldeutschland/Vodafone) to be to be lossy/congested at every days peek hours. Whereas DTAG _does_ way better. I dont like it, but as others have said: Relying on transit peering will not work well once you reach certain traffic levels. Also you can get Servers from Strato (DTAG Sub) for about the same price as from Hetzner and pump your Traffic directly into a Tier1.
- Ao7bei3s 11y ago
  Vodafone doesn't just offer cable service but also DSL and VDSL, and that's rock solid. The cable service slowdowns are technology inherent. But that's a last-mile problem and not a backbone problem. Also, these providers aren't trying to use their customer base to extort money from hosters.
  - ullus12 11y ago
    Agree on the last-mile part yet i doubt that buying from a (DSL-)Reseller is improving service quality and prices are roughly the same.
- Tepix 11y ago
  I'm a Unitymedia customer in Germany (200mbps down, 10mbps up for 42€/month including VoIP) and they have been pretty good in terms of speed. I haven't noticed any slowdowns. They also make sure that you get a little extra bandwidth so even with overhead you will actually see those advertised transfer rates in the wild.

thecatspaw 11y ago

> Is "operating at their highest capacity" a bad thing? Yes. This allows providers to say "guys look, we can not increase the traffic going over the lines, so we have to priorize things. Thats 3.50€ a month per uplink"

sajal83 11y ago

> 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]"? Yes. Basically existing links (thru transit providers) is saturated, if you(content provider) want good connectivity with these end-user networks you gotta pay more for direct connection.

MrBuddyCasino 11y ago

The latter. There is no incentive to pay for additional bandwidth if there is enough capacity for everyone, so supply is restricted. Thus the ISP saves on network infrastructure and gets additional income to prioritize higher-status traffic. What a clusterfuck, I'm embarrassed by my government.

icebraining 11y ago
My question is: why aren't the companies being asked to pay for priority telling their users about the problem? Where are the JS libraries that show a warning to the users of those ISPs?

Coding_Cat 11y ago

I think you are right about the implication. The providers tend to try and double dip by doing one of three things: * Not upgrading their network as they should * Discriminating against certain traffic, see Comcast and Netflix speeds * or by not allowing content providers to connect their CDNs free of charge, which should be a win-win situation if the providers acted in the customers best interests. I honestly believe that these bussiness practices are the providers digging their own grave. Best case scenario, they make a few quick bucks before laws get passed against this sort of thing, worst case scenario: the big boys get tired of dealing with them and start competing directly (like Google fiber).

Spooky23 11y ago

In an (admittedly different) enterprise scenario, I see consistent 50-60% peak utilization as right-sized. 75% or more is tagged for an upgrade or at least analysis to understand the traffic patterns. For a big network to deliver 100 Mbps vs. 1 Mbps connectivity to most locations is a very small cost. The big costs are the fixed costs the initial buildout. Marginal capacity changes are pretty cheap. There's no technical reason to treat network links as constrained resources. So as a network provider, you only create constraint to make money. Think of it as food & drink in a movie theatre. A bag of popcorn at the Target snack counter is $1.50. A bag of popcorn at the movies is $9. Same product, both high-margin scenarios -- the difference is you're captive to the movie theatre.

scurvy 11y ago
We start the process to add more peering ports once we see sustained traffic at 40% of port capacity (in PPS or BPS). The process takes a while depending on who you're dealing with, and before you know it, you're up to 80% right before that new port comes online.