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You're missing a point. Netflix _pays_ for their bandwidth. Namely, their network provider. (Or more likely, their peering points). It's not like somebody show

by groby_b 12y ago

You're missing a point. Netflix _pays_ for their bandwidth. Namely, their network provider. (Or more likely, their peering points). It's not like somebody showed up at their office and said "Here's a giant pipe, push all you want". And "they're not paying to the right people" is an incorrect argument. You pay _your_ connection point for money, and the recipient pays theirs. Intermediate connections need to be handled by the respective networks, not the endpoints. So if Verizon wants money, they need to extract it from their peers, not Netflix. (Or the user). Which they don't do, because, well, turns out they make enough money of it that losing a peering agreement is actually detrimental to their business. It's completely within VZWs rights to expect money from Layer3 for peering. It's not within their rights to extract it from somebody three hops down. That is the _reason_ we have peering agreements, billing individual customers doesn't make sense.

jmccree 12y ago
As far as I know, there has been no claim that Level3 pays Verizon for their peering. The Verizon-Level3 peering is settlement free as both are large Tier 1 networks. What verizon is refusing to do is upgrade the size of the interconnections until Level3 either pays them for paid peering or gets their traffic ratios back to an equal ratio. Level3 as a Tier 1 who pays no one for peering or transit, and is of course not going to do that. That leaves their transit client Netflix with the choice to either use other providers, who will likely run into the same traffic ratio issue, or pay for peering directly with Verizon. When Netflix is pushing out 1/3rds of the internets whole traffic, and it's all going in one direction, there's practically no tier 1 network out there that can provide transit for that without breaking their peering agreements, except perhaps the same content providers (Verizon, ATT) offering paid peering to netflix. It's not unreasonable with their traffic levels to expect netflix to peer directly with the largest consumer networks.

by groby_b 12y ago

jmccree 12y ago

As far as I know, there has been no claim that Level3 pays Verizon for their peering. The Verizon-Level3 peering is settlement free as both are large Tier 1 networks. What verizon is refusing to do is upgrade the size of the interconnections until Level3 either pays them for paid peering or gets their traffic ratios back to an equal ratio. Level3 as a Tier 1 who pays no one for peering or transit, and is of course not going to do that. That leaves their transit client Netflix with the choice to either use other providers, who will likely run into the same traffic ratio issue, or pay for peering directly with Verizon. When Netflix is pushing out 1/3rds of the internets whole traffic, and it's all going in one direction, there's practically no tier 1 network out there that can provide transit for that without breaking their peering agreements, except perhaps the same content providers (Verizon, ATT) offering paid peering to netflix. It's not unreasonable with their traffic levels to expect netflix to peer directly with the largest consumer networks.