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Comment by ecshafer | Hacker News Reader

The isps can pretty easily set up a cache for things that are popular. There was a time when I worked for an ISP consultancy, where Netflix would literally give ISPs a prebuilt cache server iirc for free, and that was a win win for everyone. I shouldn’t be surprised that some shitty isp thinks it’s easier to hard link, but making a cache isn’t that hard.

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I think they're referring to the famous Wikimedia flower - https://phabricator.wikimedia.org/T273741

And it's much harder now to have a caching server because everything is HTTPS, so you have to coordinate with both ends to make it work.

A couple of years ago, the main submarine link connecting my country to the internet was damaged, and internet basically slowed to a crawl for a day. Could barely open anything.

But Netflix was running at full HD with no problem. So they must have had local cache's with the ISPs.

Very likely. Netflix has a program where they ship edge cache appliances to ISPs free of charge.

There are some public details about the program, and it's quite interesting: https://openconnect.netflix.com/en/appliances/

I recall when they approached Verizon for the same thing; Verizon wanted rent[0].

[0]: https://time.com/2866004/verizon-netflix/

this is how CDNs make their money. They replicate popular content close to the users. They generally do that WITHOUT giving anyone hardware, but by renting hardware in smaller areas, and setting up their own data centers in popular areas.

source: I used to work at Akamai (it was a while ago). The myriad things they do with their edge servers is pretty amazing, but for simple CDN stuff, most of the time clients aren't shipping hardware to isps. That being said, if Netflix can convince an isp to pay its electricity and hardware maintenance costs for a popular isp's customers that's going to pay for itself very quickly. So, i can see why Netflix offers this. It's just not normal AFAIK.

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