5 ms·

Comcast, Level3 and You

35 points by wavesound 16y ago

tptacek 16y ago
This is an awesome post. Here's an accompanying awesome NANOG message: http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Nov/1058 http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Nov/1058
- snsr 16y ago
  Thanks for the link; that's the most succinct breakdown of the neutrality situation I've read to date. Still working my way through the thread.
rbranson 16y ago
This guy is spot on. He actually understands the history and architecture of the Internet, as well as the business and technical reasons for peering. To summarize his post: Comcast has essential grown to the point where they can demand payment from content providers to peer with their network, otherwise their customer's traffic travels over intentionally congested paid links through their upstream provider, Tata. This sucks because it disrupts the natural order of the Internet being essentially a "joint venture" between private companies that operate the component networks that make up the Internet.
- tptacek 16y ago
  On the other hand, if the crux of the complaint is, "we asked Comcast for 20+ interconnection ports, and they only gave us 6 for free", it's hard to feel like this is simply Comcast being abusive. I love this story. It's so complicated! Did you follow the links about how L3 did roughly the same thing to Cogent last year?
  - wmf 16y ago
    I see it more as "If Comcast doesn't connect these ports to us, we're just going to have to send the traffic either through our existing congested ports or Tata's congested ports, which is worse for everyone". It's really not clear to me what the right solution to this is.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      That's absolutely true, but what if, at the end of the day: L3 walked up to Comcast and said, "please give us 20+ additional ports for free", and what everyone is up in arms about is that Comcast said "no, not for free we won't". They're Comcast's ports!
      - wmf 16y ago
        Perhaps Level 3 should have let the existing ports congest and waited for Comcast to ask for more capacity. It seems like Level 3 is being penalized for trying to proactively expand bandwidth capacity to meet anticipated demand.
        tptacek 16y ago
        Pretty much. Where does the logic here end? Which companies have the prerogative to come up to Comcast and ask for free ports? ISPs? What about ISPs that are acting as agents for individual companies? If that's fine, why not cut out the middleman? Can the next super-popular video site just ask Comcast for ports directly? I have no opinion about this stuff, I just think it's really interesting.
  - rbranson 16y ago
    It costs them both money though. I doubt L3 gets a significantly better price on switch gear than Comcast does. Let's be serious though... peering itself is dirt ass cheap. Comcast's attitude should be to deliver the best experience to their users whom are the reason they can even turn the lights on. Peering with L3 ensures Netflix streams are delivered with decent service levels, which satisfies their customers. If Comcast has to build out extra capacity to shuttle Netflix streams from the network borders to their customers' homes, that's Comcast's problem, not L3s. The same rules should apply to L3 though, if indeed they are screwing Cogent on the other end. Everyone has cooperated amazingly well thus far, and these few greedy fucks are starting to turn something that has never been an issue before into a big deal. Ultimately it will probably culminate in fucking us all with some kind of draconian FCC regulation and/or ridiculous network issues that will drive prices up.
    - tptacek 16y ago
      Doesn't this ultimately mean that bandwidth for content providers should be free? After all, the reason Comcast "should" add this capacity is to satisfy demand for Netflix content. L3 is just acting as their agent. Is it the case that then that the next Netflix should just be able to demand bandwidth directly from Comcast?
      - wmf 16y ago
        Supposedly Google is already there, although I suspect it's more like offering than demanding. 6% of Internet traffic is from Google, and you can either pay someone to send that to you or you can receive it directly from Google without payment. Note that Google is not really getting anything for free since they have to carry the traffic over the GBone to each ISP.
      - rbranson 16y ago
        It's not "free" though. It's just a switch port to Comcast. It costs Comcast almost nothing. They still have to deliver the content anyway. At the tier 1 level, the Internet has always worked as a "you pay the cost for transferring packets on your own network" basis. It'd be one thing if Comcast was trying to charge L3 for carrying traffic to other networks, but Comcast is trying to extort fees for carrying packets on it's own network to it's own customers. That's messed up. Comcast's customers already pay AT LEAST $0.18/GB, but it's more around _NINETY CENTS_ a gigabyte, considering most of their customers pay around $45/mo and use less than 50GB of bandwidth per month.
- patrickgzill 16y ago
  The issue for me as a Comcast subscriber is, "WTF am I paying for then?" Silly me, I thought that paying Comcast and having them provide me a decent quality service was what their high-speed Internet offering was about; instead, I am just a pawn whose traffic can be shunted off to a deliberately-congested, crappy connection, then held hostage to force other companies to pay up for the access I am already paying for.

35 points by wavesound 16y ago

This is an awesome post. Here's an accompanying awesome NANOG message: http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Nov/1058 http://seclists.org/nanog/2010/Nov/1058

snsr 16y ago
Thanks for the link; that's the most succinct breakdown of the neutrality situation I've read to date. Still working my way through the thread.

rbranson 16y ago

This guy is spot on. He actually understands the history and architecture of the Internet, as well as the business and technical reasons for peering. To summarize his post: Comcast has essential grown to the point where they can demand payment from content providers to peer with their network, otherwise their customer's traffic travels over intentionally congested paid links through their upstream provider, Tata. This sucks because it disrupts the natural order of the Internet being essentially a "joint venture" between private companies that operate the component networks that make up the Internet.

tptacek 16y ago
On the other hand, if the crux of the complaint is, "we asked Comcast for 20+ interconnection ports, and they only gave us 6 for free", it's hard to feel like this is simply Comcast being abusive. I love this story. It's so complicated! Did you follow the links about how L3 did roughly the same thing to Cogent last year?
- wmf 16y ago
  I see it more as "If Comcast doesn't connect these ports to us, we're just going to have to send the traffic either through our existing congested ports or Tata's congested ports, which is worse for everyone". It's really not clear to me what the right solution to this is.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    That's absolutely true, but what if, at the end of the day: L3 walked up to Comcast and said, "please give us 20+ additional ports for free", and what everyone is up in arms about is that Comcast said "no, not for free we won't". They're Comcast's ports!
    - wmf 16y ago
      Perhaps Level 3 should have let the existing ports congest and waited for Comcast to ask for more capacity. It seems like Level 3 is being penalized for trying to proactively expand bandwidth capacity to meet anticipated demand.
      - tptacek 16y ago
        Pretty much. Where does the logic here end? Which companies have the prerogative to come up to Comcast and ask for free ports? ISPs? What about ISPs that are acting as agents for individual companies? If that's fine, why not cut out the middleman? Can the next super-popular video site just ask Comcast for ports directly? I have no opinion about this stuff, I just think it's really interesting.
- rbranson 16y ago
  It costs them both money though. I doubt L3 gets a significantly better price on switch gear than Comcast does. Let's be serious though... peering itself is dirt ass cheap. Comcast's attitude should be to deliver the best experience to their users whom are the reason they can even turn the lights on. Peering with L3 ensures Netflix streams are delivered with decent service levels, which satisfies their customers. If Comcast has to build out extra capacity to shuttle Netflix streams from the network borders to their customers' homes, that's Comcast's problem, not L3s. The same rules should apply to L3 though, if indeed they are screwing Cogent on the other end. Everyone has cooperated amazingly well thus far, and these few greedy fucks are starting to turn something that has never been an issue before into a big deal. Ultimately it will probably culminate in fucking us all with some kind of draconian FCC regulation and/or ridiculous network issues that will drive prices up.
  - tptacek 16y ago
    Doesn't this ultimately mean that bandwidth for content providers should be free? After all, the reason Comcast "should" add this capacity is to satisfy demand for Netflix content. L3 is just acting as their agent. Is it the case that then that the next Netflix should just be able to demand bandwidth directly from Comcast?
    - wmf 16y ago
      Supposedly Google is already there, although I suspect it's more like offering than demanding. 6% of Internet traffic is from Google, and you can either pay someone to send that to you or you can receive it directly from Google without payment. Note that Google is not really getting anything for free since they have to carry the traffic over the GBone to each ISP.
    - rbranson 16y ago
      It's not "free" though. It's just a switch port to Comcast. It costs Comcast almost nothing. They still have to deliver the content anyway. At the tier 1 level, the Internet has always worked as a "you pay the cost for transferring packets on your own network" basis. It'd be one thing if Comcast was trying to charge L3 for carrying traffic to other networks, but Comcast is trying to extort fees for carrying packets on it's own network to it's own customers. That's messed up. Comcast's customers already pay AT LEAST $0.18/GB, but it's more around _NINETY CENTS_ a gigabyte, considering most of their customers pay around $45/mo and use less than 50GB of bandwidth per month.
patrickgzill 16y ago
The issue for me as a Comcast subscriber is, "WTF am I paying for then?" Silly me, I thought that paying Comcast and having them provide me a decent quality service was what their high-speed Internet offering was about; instead, I am just a pawn whose traffic can be shunted off to a deliberately-congested, crappy connection, then held hostage to force other companies to pay up for the access I am already paying for.