My understanding is that Comcast offered Netflix commercially reasonable terms for colo and cross-connect and Netflix opted for public interconnect via an excha

My understanding is that Comcast offered Netflix commercially reasonable terms for colo and cross-connect and Netflix opted for public interconnect via an exchange, which alleviated the bandwidth constraints caused by Cogent taking Netflix's money and then refusing to comply with their cost-sharing peering agreement with Comcast. Calling the Netflix CDN boxes "free" is totally misleading because Comcast would still need to pay for the router ports to carry the traffic internally, space & power, and management assistance. That deal works for a small ISP that pays for most of its bandwidth but not a large ISP that uses significant amounts of shared-cost peering. If Comcast is required to host those boxes "for free" what of every other CDN that they previously had agreements with? I agree that Comcast marketing "up to X megabits" is misleading and those chickens have come home to roost with people thinking that their last mile means they should get that speed to every point on the Internet 24 hours a day. I have been negotiating commercial bandwidth agreements for years and even from a tier 1 you can't get that guarantee in a contract.