7 ms·
Comcast and Netflix now have a direct adjacency
- koblas 13y agoI've noticed that the 11greatoaks.ca.ibone.comcast.net router(s) (Equinix SV1) are typically the ones that fail / have large latency issues. Hopefully if this has happened then they've increased overall capacity through this bottleneck.
- bdb 13y agoYou're seeing this because that's where Comcast primarily buys transit and peers with other networks; those edges are where the congested ports are. They generally have plenty of capacity between SV1 and their CMTSes (even if they have to take you from Oakland to Sac-town to get from SF to San Jose).
- bifrost 13y agoComcast has been horribly congested in the SFBA for months. I believe they've been looking at offloading that congestion and frankly moving Netflix is a no brainer.
- squigs25 13y agoA short route doesn't necessarily mean good bandwidth
- wmf 13y agoIt does reduce the buck-passing. See the current Verizon-Netflix squabble using Cogent as a proxy.
- btgeekboy 13y agoAs a FIOS customer, it really is delightful. Especially when you're trying to get actual work done from your business FIOS connection to your rack in a colocation facility, not watch videos. Only after calling and complaining for a week did they change the route, and magically, the latency and 50%+ packet loss went away.
- ck2 13y agoIt would be funny if netflix just looked for one of their hubs/datacenters and moved in next door on purpose. ISPs are common carriers and must be regulated as such, because as soon as Comcast makes its own netflix-like service, you can forget getting netflix to stream smoothly.
- nathancahill 13y agoI've done this before for large scraping projects. I find the datacenter the target website is hosted in, then get a dedicated server right next to it. I've never gotten better performance.
- weaksauce 13y agoHow large of a scraping project are we talking about in terms of throughput?
- nathancahill 13y agoLargest was over 300TB. I talked with the owner beforehand and got access to the internal IP address so traffic wouldn't leave the datacenter (free of cost). I offered to help them set up an API instead of scraping, but they decided scraping was easier in the short term.
- ck2 13y agoPutting aside legal issues, you don't have any moral problems doing volumes of scraping content that is not yours?
- diminoten 13y agoWhy should he? It's publicly available information.
- CamperBob2 13y agoOver time, I've learned to wget every web page and content archive I want to keep. The Internet forgets.
- jonny_eh 13y agoI did notice last night that my stream of House of Cards looked way better than it has in the past month (when it started to go bad). It was HD level the whole hour, while previously it would only go HD for about 10 minutes total randomly through the episode. I'm a Comcast user in San Mateo, CA.
- freeasinfree 13y agoUsing the Equinix IX https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/faq https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/faq
- bdb 13y agoI don't think so. It's multiple direct 10GE ports. Given the traffic volume the two networks exchange, there's no way it would be economical to move these bits over a public peering exchange (which Comcast doesn't participate in in the first place). Even so, if it were in fact going via the IX, you'd see Netflix's IP from the exchange (206.223.116.133) as hop 8 in the traceroute.
- tostitos1979 13y agoAm I understanding this right? If I am an ISP, I can request a Netflix appliance and serve customer requests for netflix content from this appliance directly?
- bifrost 13y agoBasically... If you're moving 5Gbps+, contact Netflix.
- jeremydw 13y agoPerhaps it's Netflix Open Connect? (http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment-Guide.pdf http://oc.nflxvideo.net/docs/OpenConnect-Deployment-Guide.pd..., https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect)
- bifrost 13y agoI can confirm this: 198.45.63.0/24 *[BGP/170] 2d 05:02:06, MED 150, localpref 100, from 68.86.80.82 AS path: 7922 2906 I
- MiguelHudnandez 13y agoIt's anti-climactic that all it was going to take was a compelling business case. Netflix made it easy with their peering initiative [1]. Now Comcast gets to count these bytes against their customers' quotas, and it costs them nearly nothing to deliver the traffic. This reminds me of NNTP, but Netflix is still running their own hardware. [1] Netflix's "Open Connect" https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines https://signup.netflix.com/openconnect/guidelines
- sp332 13y agoMost boxes like "Open Connect" pay to be colocated and connected that way. Netflix insists on free installation.
- ef4 13y agoNot true. Big CDNs have been cutting deals like this for a long time. It's often in a network owner's financial interest to host a node for free, because it saves them so much upstream bandwidth which they would otherwise pay for.
- bifrost 13y agoMost CDN's pay money for this...
- ef4 13y agoThat's pretty hard to generalize. I worked at the biggest CDN for many years. They definitely get free traffic in many places. They had a whole team who's job was talking to network owners and saying "look, you paid for X terrabytes of traffic to us last month. We can cut that cost by 100 if you let us install servers inside your network that will cache the popular content locally." It all depends on relative size. Bigger networks can demand money from smaller networks and/or CDNs. Networks of comparable size can profitably peer with each other without exchanging cash. Comcast may not do it for free, but the national ISP in a smallish developing country sure might. It's a big dance, and the relationships are constantly changing. Managing it all in software to actually optimize cost and performance is a big part of the secret sauce for a CDN.
- CamperBob2 13y agoHow are you concluding that from the tracert?
- sergers 13y agoMeh. So your ISP joined the Netflix open connect CDN to make your Netflix experience even slower. Have fun blocking that address and other known Netflix cdn
- egray2 13y agoIsn't it possible that the traffic could just be going over an MPLS backbone? If that's the case, then there could potentially be more hops that aren't seen.
- bifrost 13y agoThats not relevant to traffic interchange...
- akulbe 13y agoI will admit that I am probably making a pretty sweeping assumption here... but I'm assuming Netflix previously had the same access as everyone else on the Internet, from Comcast - and now, they do not. They have BETTER access. To me, this is disturbing. Surely there is some financial incentive for Comcast to do this. It seems to me that this is exactly the kind of thing that the whole "net neutrality" issue is trying to prevent (i.e. back office deals that give one content provider better access over others) Or... am I just missing lots of things? (wouldn't be the first time!) :)