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Comment by thedufer | Hacker News Reader

> It sounds like Level3 wants to enter into bigger-money contracts with the ISPs

As the article points out, peering rarely involves money (and shouldn't ever; as the word peer implies, its a largely symmetric relationship).

The ISPs' customers are paying the ISPs for bandwidth and then requesting traffic. Level3 is providing said traffic and then the ISP drops it because they don't have enough bandwidth. How can a reasonable person possibly interpret this as being Level3's fault?

If an ISP isn't willing to supply its customers with the bandwidth that is being paid for, they need to either fix that or stop promising things they aren't willing to deliver on.

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> stop promising things they aren't willing to deliver on.

Very few ISPs offer residential Internet access with SLAs that guarantee performance or even availability. They mostly promise only a 'best effort' class of service.

That's a good point. I meant promise in the sense that that's how customers often interpret a bandwidth claim - legally, they're making no such promise (otherwise they'd be in a lot of trouble).

"Best effort" doesn't mean "Here's your dinner, take it or leave it."

ISPs have been successfully managing aggregate network bandwidth growth for over twenty years.

I work at a place that has transformed it's utilization of the internet via cloud services -- utilization going from 80-120MB/s to multi-gigabit. Adapting to that change was relatively easy and cheap. With the economies of scale that a large Telco has, it's a drop in the bucket.

Right, and the problem is that their version of best effort doesn't involve trying very hard at all, since they have minimal competition in most local markets.

I've been speed testing my shitty (Time Warner, yay) internet lately and am getting fully 50% of my 15m/s that I pay a whopping $80+/mo (hard to disambiguate between the 'packaged' cost with TV). I once got a Comcast rep to admit that they basically were unconcerned with providing anything which is at least %60 of the level that they advertise. Unless the entire company is both mentally and physically challenged I seriously doubt that this represents a "best effort" class of service. This is go-fuck-yourself service that a dive bar would be embarrassed by.

If Level3 can't give Netflix what it promised Netflix it would deliver, maybe Netflix should use a different CDN.

Other CDNs aren't having this problem, because they're willing to work with the ISPs.

> Other CDNs aren't having this problem, because they're willing to work with the ISPs.

Do we know this?

You asked this question in like 3 places, but yes, if you read the blog post written by Level3, you'll see them mention that other backbone providers are making deals with the ISPs, but that they're refusing to.

> if you read the blog post written by Level3, you'll see them mention that other backbone providers are making deals with the ISPs, but that they're refusing to

Where in Level3's blog post does it say this? I'm not seeing it. Certainly at least one other transit provider, Cogent, doesn't seem to be making ISP deals; if it did, the Netflix-Comcast deal wouldn't have happened

(Also, in the post I was responding to in this subthread, you said CDN's, not transit providers. They're not the same.)

Yes, let's encourage people to pay ransoms. That's going to end in a rational system.

Netflix switching would, in the short term, give them more bandwidth. In the long term, encouraging ransoms will cause them to go up and Netflix will be forced to keep raising their prices. This is exactly what Netflix does not want to happen, and they are wisely refusing to play ball.

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