5 ms·

In the last two years, there were periods where YouTube was unusable for me in the early to mid evenings. My provider freely admitted that their current peering

by pilif 13y ago

In the last two years, there were periods where YouTube was unusable for me in the early to mid evenings. My provider freely admitted that their current peering arrangement just wasn't good enough for all the traffic that their customers were creating by watching youtube videos. Over time, this was fixed, only to return later, at which point it was fixed again. Huge kudos to my provider (Cablecom in Switzerland) for actually fixing this and even in a somewhat timely manner. But. As more and more of the internet users traffic gets centralized to a few big services (Netflix, YouTube, to some extent Facebook), the usual unbureaucratic peering agreements start to become less and less feasible as traffic starts to be centralized with a few very major content providers. Not only that: some players might start to produce so much traffic that it starts to become useful to go as far as to start doing special proxy solutions for specific content providers (another provider here in Switzerland has a special solution in place for youtube after talking with Google). At which point does all that effort in order to have your end-users be able to access some of these huge content providers stop being worth it in the name of net neutrality? Providing network neutrality is easy when everything just works, but when you have to make new peering agreements, build new pipes or create special infrastructure just for one content provider that doesn't pay you a cent, then that whole neutrality thing becomes very inconvenient and, I have to say, unfair to the providers. Yes. I really, really want network neutrality, but I see that aside of all the political and business-model-preservation issues, we are running into technical issues too and those need solving too.

izacus 13y ago
Last I worked at a ISP, Google actually DOES provide YouTube caching servers to ISPs that want it - they bring you a black box machine which you plug into your backbone switch that does transparent caching for users. Getting one has significantly reduced load on internatinal peering lines (I'm from a small EU country) and made quite a differece for our customers as well (suddenly YouTube started working smoothly for most of them while on other ISPs it sometime still stutter). I guess same thing can be provided by Netflix as well.
- pilif 13y ago
  True. According to RKearney in this thread, Netflix does that too. But isn't that, too, a break of network neutrality? The moment you start accepting content-provider specific equipment, aren't you preferring them over those that don't provide equipment? Wouldn't accepting equipment from one provider compel you to accept from others too in order to stay neutral.
  - soneil 13y ago
    I don't see anything that says they wouldn't accept equipment? "If your endpoint drives enough traffic, we're open to solutions" doesn't seem silly. What about ISPs that provide mirrors? An example I've used before was Australian ISPs providing steam, linux, etc mirrors to save their transoceanic costs. Is that still neutral?
Dylan16807 13y ago
If they treated it as getting paid per megabyte delivered, they would love to make all these interconnects and such. They fact that they chose to sell 'unlimited' data and look at network investment as a waste is not unfair to them in any way. It's a self-imposed illusion of a problem.
- pilif 13y ago
  But they are NOT paid per megabyte delivered. The moment they start doing that customers complain even more (remember the Comcast 300G limit uproar). So charging customers per MB is out and charging content providers per MB is out too. Providing crappy service or investing significant amounts of money and time is all that's left and considering the local monopolies, crappy service is what we get as that's the least amount of trouble for the providers.
  - cdash 13y ago
    I am not sure that charging per MB would actually be a problem except they would want to charge outrageous prices instead of fair prices.
lolwutf 13y ago
Forgive my ignorance, but why is this such a non-trivial task? While it seems some management might be required to sufficiently route high traffic partners, does it really require 'building new pipes' or 'special infrastructure' that has a non-trivial cost? I thought the wonderful aspect of the Internet is such tasks and distribution could be had for very, very cheap.
- pilif 13y ago
  Let's say your customers are complaining that youtube is slow. Let's say, you found out that it's because the peering partner of your peering partners peering partner is congested. To fix this, you can try to talk to that any of the 3 parties involved, or you find a new peering agreement (if possible), or you actually start paying for the traffic. Or you just leave it as-is, hoping that at some point somebody closer to the congestion starts complaining, which eventually is going to happen. This certainly is the cheapest route and this is what we honestly can expect considering that all we are promised is 'best effort'. Everything beyond that is really cool to have, but also comes with some expense for the providers.
jey 13y ago
> another provider here in Switzerland has a special solution in place for youtube after talking with Google It's my understanding that this is actually pretty common: https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html
wmf 13y ago
...when you have to make new peering agreements, build new pipes or create special infrastructure just for one content provider that doesn't pay you a cent... An ISP can upgrade their equipment for free to receive YouTube traffic via peering or they can upgrade their equipment and pay for transit to receive the same traffic. Given that the traffic is going to be received anyway, peering is by far the cheapest way to accept it. And if we imagine a world where there were 100 niche video sites instead of YouTube, the total bandwidth would probably be the same but ISPs would be paying for transit to receive it. Google and Netflix's economies of scale benefit ISPs as well.
kalleboo 13y ago
The way I see it is that once content providers start paying the ISPs, the end users become the product instead of the customer. And when that happens, a lot of perverse incentives tend to come into play and everyone suffers. The customers (end users) are paying for access to content. Everyone is browsing in YouTube. If the ISP can't afford the connections to provide that, they need to raise their prices.

by pilif 13y ago

izacus 13y ago

Last I worked at a ISP, Google actually DOES provide YouTube caching servers to ISPs that want it - they bring you a black box machine which you plug into your backbone switch that does transparent caching for users. Getting one has significantly reduced load on internatinal peering lines (I'm from a small EU country) and made quite a differece for our customers as well (suddenly YouTube started working smoothly for most of them while on other ISPs it sometime still stutter). I guess same thing can be provided by Netflix as well.

pilif 13y ago
True. According to RKearney in this thread, Netflix does that too. But isn't that, too, a break of network neutrality? The moment you start accepting content-provider specific equipment, aren't you preferring them over those that don't provide equipment? Wouldn't accepting equipment from one provider compel you to accept from others too in order to stay neutral.
- soneil 13y ago
  I don't see anything that says they wouldn't accept equipment? "If your endpoint drives enough traffic, we're open to solutions" doesn't seem silly. What about ISPs that provide mirrors? An example I've used before was Australian ISPs providing steam, linux, etc mirrors to save their transoceanic costs. Is that still neutral?

Dylan16807 13y ago

If they treated it as getting paid per megabyte delivered, they would love to make all these interconnects and such. They fact that they chose to sell 'unlimited' data and look at network investment as a waste is not unfair to them in any way. It's a self-imposed illusion of a problem.

pilif 13y ago
But they are NOT paid per megabyte delivered. The moment they start doing that customers complain even more (remember the Comcast 300G limit uproar). So charging customers per MB is out and charging content providers per MB is out too. Providing crappy service or investing significant amounts of money and time is all that's left and considering the local monopolies, crappy service is what we get as that's the least amount of trouble for the providers.
- cdash 13y ago
  I am not sure that charging per MB would actually be a problem except they would want to charge outrageous prices instead of fair prices.

lolwutf 13y ago

Forgive my ignorance, but why is this such a non-trivial task? While it seems some management might be required to sufficiently route high traffic partners, does it really require 'building new pipes' or 'special infrastructure' that has a non-trivial cost? I thought the wonderful aspect of the Internet is such tasks and distribution could be had for very, very cheap.

pilif 13y ago
Let's say your customers are complaining that youtube is slow. Let's say, you found out that it's because the peering partner of your peering partners peering partner is congested. To fix this, you can try to talk to that any of the 3 parties involved, or you find a new peering agreement (if possible), or you actually start paying for the traffic. Or you just leave it as-is, hoping that at some point somebody closer to the congestion starts complaining, which eventually is going to happen. This certainly is the cheapest route and this is what we honestly can expect considering that all we are promised is 'best effort'. Everything beyond that is really cool to have, but also comes with some expense for the providers.

jey 13y ago

> another provider here in Switzerland has a special solution in place for youtube after talking with Google It's my understanding that this is actually pretty common: https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html https://peering.google.com/about/ggc.html

wmf 13y ago

...when you have to make new peering agreements, build new pipes or create special infrastructure just for one content provider that doesn't pay you a cent... An ISP can upgrade their equipment for free to receive YouTube traffic via peering or they can upgrade their equipment and pay for transit to receive the same traffic. Given that the traffic is going to be received anyway, peering is by far the cheapest way to accept it. And if we imagine a world where there were 100 niche video sites instead of YouTube, the total bandwidth would probably be the same but ISPs would be paying for transit to receive it. Google and Netflix's economies of scale benefit ISPs as well.

kalleboo 13y ago

The way I see it is that once content providers start paying the ISPs, the end users become the product instead of the customer. And when that happens, a lot of perverse incentives tend to come into play and everyone suffers. The customers (end users) are paying for access to content. Everyone is browsing in YouTube. If the ISP can't afford the connections to provide that, they need to raise their prices.