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Comment by _stephan | Hacker News Reader

Does anyone have an idea what the European ISP is that refuses to provide enough peering capacity?

I would have guessed it was French ISP Proxad/Free, which is notorious for having generally shitty peering to a large part of Internet (like Youtube, Imgur or Github, among others).

But though they are a large ISP they are not dominant, and their peering with Level3 is actually quite good... which is why I tunnel most of my connection to my server (the route to which happens to be through Level3) so I can get usable internet.

It really sucks to be able to download an iso from some server in the US at 2 MB/s, but seeing small Imgur gifs load frame by frame, or Github repos cloning at 20 kB/s.

Free just doesn't buy enough transit; they are not a tier 1 provider.

The ISPs in question explicitly aren't tier 1 providers.

Free is tier 2, and they are very much behaving like the ISPs the article is talking about, just not with Level 3.

Free buys transit, and that transit is full. All the time. The article is talking about settlement free peering. There are significant differences between Free running their uplinks hot and a peering partners running their interconnects hot.

They said its not from the UK and judging from their connection points, I guess its Deutsche Telekom.

Don't know they described them as a monopoly position and cable is pretty strong in Germany. I think Spain or Italy might be better guesses.

Telefonica in Spain might be a reasonable guess. Ono the cable company isn't huge.

I think Telecom Italian is dominant in Italy and there is virtually no cable at all so that would be my guess.

Too late to fix typo: Telecom Italia (not Italian).

Yes, it seems it's the "Telekom" from Germany:

* http://www.golem.de/news/level-3-sechs-grosse-internetprovid...

* http://www.welt.de/wirtschaft/article117963991/Bei-Europas-T...

France Telecom

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