3 ms·

These used to be more common in the US and some still exist but the big telcos have all stopped upgrading their equipment which deliberately chokes the availabl

These used to be more common in the US and some still exist but the big telcos have all stopped upgrading their equipment which deliberately chokes the available bandwidth at those locations. They also deliberately don't on-board any new ones. This is the same strategy they used against Netflix if you recall - deliberately don't upgrade the linecards at choke points to ensure Netflix packets get dropped. Netflix eventually caved (and raised prices) so we're all paying for it on both ends: as ISP customers and Netflix subscribers. Who doesn't like a bit of double-dipping? They really really want to go back to the long-distance telephone days where people paid according to some kind of metering plan. That's the whole push behind getting rid of Net Neutrality (which is how the internet always worked up to that point - so much so we had to invent a new term to describe what was taken away). Why invest in new plant, fiber, or equipment? Just stop upgrading or upgrade very slowly and let increases in data usage dump money directly into your pocket. A great gig if you can get it.

toast0 6y ago
The reasons residential ISPs don't peer is two-fold. a) They're nearly all Tier-1 networks, and Tier-1 networks have very hard to meet peering requirements; AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have been Tier-1 since forever, and now they're the dominant wireless carriers. AT&T and Verizon are also large residential ISPs, and CenturyLink is another, and they're a Tier-1 too. Comcast is effectively Tier-1 in the US, but they don't have an international network (yet?). b) residential connections are setup to be unbalanced flows, and peering policies at networks with restrictive policies generally require roughly balanced flows. Very few networks that do business with consumers are going to get balanced flows. Maybe a consumer oriented backup service can, if they mostly receive backups and don't send a lot of restores; 1-1 messaging without persistent server storage should be pretty much balanced, but nearly everything else is pretty much never going to be balanced. Of course, tier-1 networks also won't peer with you if you're a customer or have been a customer recently; so if you do end up with appropriate flows to your transit provider, you'd need to switch to another provider for some amount of time before coming back to ask for peering, and they may increase requirements in the meantime. Things were different when we had local/regional ISPs (dial-up and DSL line sharing). As those got big enough to justify multiple transit providers, they would gravitate towards peering places, because you can pickup multiple transit providers easily, and also peer to reduce costs for both networks when connecting to other networks at the peering place. A local ISP doesn't really care about traffic balance, they just want traffic off their transit link; and content networks don't care about traffic balance, they just want traffic off their transit link. If I had my way, we'd get mandatory line sharing for the last mile (and something for wireless?), so that we could have meaningful competition in IP networking at the local level again. Something where all the last mile infrastructure providers are prohibited from offering retail service would be best; they could keep their tier-1 ISP business, and their last mile business, but someone else would have to at least glue the two parts together.

toast0 6y ago

The reasons residential ISPs don't peer is two-fold. a) They're nearly all Tier-1 networks, and Tier-1 networks have very hard to meet peering requirements; AT&T, Verizon, and Sprint have been Tier-1 since forever, and now they're the dominant wireless carriers. AT&T and Verizon are also large residential ISPs, and CenturyLink is another, and they're a Tier-1 too. Comcast is effectively Tier-1 in the US, but they don't have an international network (yet?). b) residential connections are setup to be unbalanced flows, and peering policies at networks with restrictive policies generally require roughly balanced flows. Very few networks that do business with consumers are going to get balanced flows. Maybe a consumer oriented backup service can, if they mostly receive backups and don't send a lot of restores; 1-1 messaging without persistent server storage should be pretty much balanced, but nearly everything else is pretty much never going to be balanced. Of course, tier-1 networks also won't peer with you if you're a customer or have been a customer recently; so if you do end up with appropriate flows to your transit provider, you'd need to switch to another provider for some amount of time before coming back to ask for peering, and they may increase requirements in the meantime. Things were different when we had local/regional ISPs (dial-up and DSL line sharing). As those got big enough to justify multiple transit providers, they would gravitate towards peering places, because you can pickup multiple transit providers easily, and also peer to reduce costs for both networks when connecting to other networks at the peering place. A local ISP doesn't really care about traffic balance, they just want traffic off their transit link; and content networks don't care about traffic balance, they just want traffic off their transit link. If I had my way, we'd get mandatory line sharing for the last mile (and something for wireless?), so that we could have meaningful competition in IP networking at the local level again. Something where all the last mile infrastructure providers are prohibited from offering retail service would be best; they could keep their tier-1 ISP business, and their last mile business, but someone else would have to at least glue the two parts together.