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Comment by kortilla | Hacker News Reader

The problem with this argument is that you end up in a scenario where an ISP makes an inadequately provisioned peering path (either through an IXP fabric or transit) to Netflix that just runs at saturation.

Customers still get plenty of bandwidth to everything else and Netflix effectively ends up capped. This happened with a major cable ISP and Netflix already.

You’ll quickly find out that “bandwidth the customers paid for” doesn’t mean nearly as much as you think it does because you can have excess in the last mile and terrible AS-to-AS connectivity.

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There is no excuse for inadequately provisioning the backend. They know what their customers want to consume. It isn't 99% text anymore.

If I download 1TB from 1000 servers should the ISP have any claim to charge them a toll? If I download 1TB from a single server do they now get to impose a toll?

The excuse would be that it's not free and the revenue from lost customers is less than the cost of upgrading the peering points.

The money that funds everything on the Internet comes from the end users who pay to access. The ISPs and all middlemen take from that pool of cash. If I've been sold a service to an open network I need to be delivered that service. The minutia of backhaul access is irrelevant. Their business doesn't exist without people and businesses paying for access.

What this arrangement does is limit revenue growth which is why the financial schemers want to double dip with their extortionate tolling on entities that already pay. They see what the cable operators get away with on their closed video distribution networks negotiating for access and want to replicate the same on the Internet.

There is no toll involved here, this is a limited 100gbps interconnect.

If an ISP over-provisions these too far, they are wasting money and will not be competitive.

>There is no excuse for inadequately provisioning the backend.

You don’t know what you’re talking about. When this happened was when Netflix exploded in popularity. If I’m running an ISP in Kansas and a service explodes in popularity that is hosted exclusively out of England and my transit provider has saturated peering with the undersea route, it’s not obvious who is responsible for picking up the bill there.

Transit isn’t full line rate to anywhere on earth and suggesting otherwise will get you laughed out of any room with network engineers.

It's only limited because ISPs hate investing. Yes in 2000 almost nobody was watching video on the internet but the same applies with roads- traffic increases so you have to build more capacity.

To continue your road analogy: if traffic to one specific destination increases by a ton, it makes far more sense to "batch" that traffic by building trains instead. This frees up the roads for all the people going to less individually popular destinations.

The network equivalent to this would be having local caching servers. Netflix customers can stream from the cache and only a fraction of their traffic will contribute to upstream congestion, leaving plenty of bandwidth for people just browsing the web or watching content on less popular services.

Due to the modern streaming tech stack, such a cache can't really be automatic and provider-neutral, so of course Netflix needs to work with the ISP to set that up. If Netflix and the other providers thought about sustainability even a little bit, they'd develop standards for efficient delivery, including caching, and the ISPs could simply buy a universal "cache box" and be done with it.

> Due to the modern streaming tech stack, such a cache can't really be automatic and provider-neutral, so of course Netflix needs to work with the ISP to set that up. If Netflix and the other providers thought about sustainability even a little bit, they'd develop standards for efficient delivery, including caching, and the ISPs could simply buy a universal "cache box" and be done with it.

I am sorry but there is absolutely no reason why Netflix should be paying a toll under any circumstance here. It is one thing to request Netflix to provide the netflix appliance to be installed at ISP location free of cost which I agree with but it is entirely unacceptable for an ISP to tell someone like Netflix that they needs pay a toll.

Remember what we are fighting against: there is no technical limitation here. People were on Verizon Fiber with bad experience on Netflix which got better when they tried to access Netflix over their puny work VPN. We are talking with ISPs who are strictly malicious in order to boost their own streaming over competition. I can't imagine why anyone would argue FOR their Internet Service Provider to act as a gatekeeper

You missed the point. It’s a 3 party relationship where both Netflix and the cable company didn’t want to pay to increase capacity to the intermediary transit provider.

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